Development In 1940, Walt Disney released
Fantasia, his third animated feature film, consisting of eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music. Initially he planned to have the film on continual release with new segments replacing older ones so audiences would never see the same film twice. The idea was dropped following the film's initial low box office receipts and a mixed response from critics. Following preliminary work on new segments, the idea was shelved by 1942 and was not revisited for the remainder of Disney's life. In 1980, animators
Wolfgang Reitherman and
Mel Shaw started preliminary work on
Musicana, a feature film "mixing jazz, classical music, myths, modern art ... following the old
Fantasia format" that was to present "ethnic tales from around the world with the music of the various countries". The project was cancelled in favor of ''
Mickey's Christmas Carol'' (1983). had
pitched the idea of a
sequel to
Fantasia.|alt= The idea of a
Fantasia sequel was revived shortly after
Michael Eisner became chief executive officer of
The Walt Disney Company in 1984, when Walt's nephew, vice chairman
Roy E. Disney, suggested it to him at a lunch. and he recalled Eisner's reaction: "It was as if a big light bulb went on over his head. The idea was enticing, but we didn't have the resources to carry it out". However,
Walt Disney Studios chairman
Jeffrey Katzenberg showed a lack of interest in the film. He had once asked
André Previn to work on a
Fantasia film but Previn declined after he learned it was to feature songs by
the Beatles rather than classical music. Eisner approached
Leonard Bernstein with the same idea, but while he seemed enthusiastic, Bernstein died before production began. It took a further seven years before the film was reconsidered, after the 1990 reissue of
Fantasia grossed $25 million domestically and the announcement of its limited availability on
home video in 1991 prompted 9.25 million pre-orders. Disney saw its commercial success as a sign that there was enough public interest in the
Fantasia franchise to make a sequel. Eisner finally gave the
green-light to the film in 1991, and had Disney serve as executive producer on the basis that its production was funded by the proceeds from the video sales. Disney assigned
Donald W. Ernst as producer and Hendel Butoy as supervisory director, having liked his work on
The Rescuers Down Under (1990). During the search for a suitable conductor, Disney and
Walt Disney Feature Animation president
Thomas Schumacher invited
Metropolitan Opera conductor
James Levine and manager
Peter Gelb to a meeting in September 1991. Disney recalled: "I asked James what his thought was on a three minute version of Beethoven's fifth symphony. He paused and went 'I think the right three minutes would be beautiful'". In November 1992, Disney, Schumacher, Levine, Gelb, and Butoy met in Vienna to discuss a collection of story reels developed, one of them being
Pines of Rome, which Levine took an immediate liking to. Butoy described Levine's enthusiasm toward the film as "like a kid in a candy store". The title was changed to
Fantasia 1999, followed by
Fantasia 2000 to coincide with its theatrical release in 2000. Disney formed its initial running order with half of the
Fantasia program and only "three or four new numbers" with the aim of releasing a "semi-new movie". Realizing the idea would not work, he kept three
Fantasia segments—''The Sorcerer's Apprentice
, The Nutcracker Suite
, and Dance of the Hours
—in the program for "quite a while". Night on Bald Mountain
was the most difficult segment for him to remove from his original running order because it was one of his favorites. He had placed it in the middle of the film without Ave Maria
, but felt it did not work and scrapped the idea. Later on, Dance of the Hours
was dropped and The Nutcracker Suite
was replaced by Rhapsody in Blue
during the last few months of production following the response from numerous test screenings. The segment underwent digital restoration by Cinesite in Los Angeles. Disney considered using Clair de Lune, a piece originally made for Fantasia'' that followed two
great white herons flying through the
Everglades at night, but thought it was "pretty boring". An idea to have "a nightmare and a dream struggling for a sleeping child's soul" to
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by
Sergei Rachmaninoff was fully storyboarded, but fell through. Hunt first thought of the story on a morning walk in Pasadena, California, one depicting a battle of "good" against "evil" and how the conflict resolves itself. It took Hunt approximately two years, from start to finish, to complete the segment. Disney and Ernst decided to go with Hunt's idea; Hunt avoided producing an entirely abstract work because "you can get something abstract on every computer screen" with ease. Hunt divided the segment into 31 mini-scenes, noting down points in which he would employ vivid color when the music was bright and fluid, and then switch to darker hues when the music felt darker and denser. The segment combines hand drawn backgrounds using pastels and paint that were scanned into the
Computer Animation Production System (CAPS), and
computer-generated imagery (CGI) of abstract shapes and effects, which were layered on top. Hunt explained that scanning each drawing "was a one-shot deal" as the
platen that pressed onto it would alter the pastel once it had been scanned. At one point during production, Hunt and Yasuda completed 68 pastel drawings in eight days. The segment was produced using
Houdini animation software. Butoy served as director with James Fujii handling the story. Butoy sketched the sequence on yellow
Post-it notes. The story originally involved the whales flying around from the perspective of a group of penguins, but the idea was scrapped to make the baby whale a central character. The whales were also set to return to Earth but Butoy said it "never felt quite right", leading to the decision to have them break through a cloud ceiling and enter a different world by the supernova. Butoy created a "musical intensity chart" for the animators to follow which "tracked the ups and downs of the music ... as the music brightens so does the color", and vice versa. He explained that because CGI was in its infancy during development, the first third of the segment was hand drawn using pencil to get a feel of how the whales would move. When the drawings were scanned into the CAPS system, Butoy found the whales were either moving too fast or had less weight to them. The drawings were altered to make the whales slow down and "more believable". The eyes of the whales were drawn by hand, as the desired looks and glances were not fully achievable using CGI. Butoy recalled the challenge of having the water appear and move as naturally as possible; the team decided to write computer code from scratch as traditional animation would have been too time-consuming and would have produced undesired results. The code handling the pod of whales was written so the whales would move away if they were to collide and not bump into, overlap, or go through each other. The same technique was used for the stampede scene in
The Lion King (1994), which was produced at the same time.
Rhapsody in Blue , director of
Rhapsody in Blue and
The Carnival of the Animals, Finale Rhapsody in Blue is the first
Fantasia segment with music from an American composer. It originated in 1995 when director and animator
Eric Goldberg approached
Al Hirschfeld about the idea of an animated short set to Gershwin's composition in the style of Hirschfeld's illustrations. In December 1998, Goldberg pitched
Rhapsody in Blue to
Thomas Schumacher and received the green-light to produce it, and Hirschfeld agreed to serve as artistic consultant and allowed the animators to adapt his works. Duke is named after jazz musician
Duke Ellington. The bottom of his toothpaste tube reads "NINA", an
Easter egg referencing Hirschfeld's daughter Nina, whose name Hirschfeld inscribed in several of his drawings since her birth in 1945. Another easter egg references artist Emily Jiuliano, whose name is shown as "E. Jiuliano". Rachel was designed after the Goldbergs' daughter; Goldberg took Hirschfeld's original illustration of Gershwin and animated it to make him play part of the "rhapsody" on the piano. When Disney suggested using the Shostakovich piece, Butoy flipped through the book and found the story's structure fit to the music. When Humphries saw the sketches he designed the segment with works by
Caravaggio and
Rembrandt in mind to give the segment a "timeless" feel, while keeping the colors "as romantic as possible" during the scenes when the soldier and ballerina are first getting acquainted. Live-action footage of a ballerina was used as a guide for the toy ballerina's movements. Butoy found the Jack-in-a-box a difficult character to design and animate with its spring base and how he moved with the box. His appearance went through numerous changes, partly due to the lack of reference material available to the team. The segment marked the first time the Disney studio created a film's main characters entirely from CGI; Initially Butoy asked
Pixar Animation Studios to handle the computer graphics, but CGI artist Steve Goldberg convinced him to let Disney's own team produce it. Rain animation from
Bambi (1942) was scanned into the CAPS system and digitally altered to fit into the segment. An excerpt of the segment was shown at the 1998
SIGGRAPH conference. Goldberg was partly inspired by co-director
Mike Gabriel, who would play with a yo-yo as he took a break from working on
Pocahontas (1995); Gabriel is given a credit for "yo-yo tricks" in the end credits. The segment was produced with CGI and 6,000
watercolor paintings on heavy bond paper.
''The Sorcerer's Apprentice'' Pomp and Circumstance (Land of Hope and Glory) Mostly known as Britain's most loved patriotic song (thanks its choral counterpart
Land of Hope and Glory) the original march was created for royal and solemn events, but Eisner suggested his use as a stand-alone piece after he attended a graduation and thought its familiarity would be suitable for a
Fantasia segment. His idea involved a selection of
Disney princesses and heroes in a wedding procession carrying their future children who would then be presented in a ceremony. The animators' preliminary designs depicted a
Greco-Roman setting; one of the staff members described the artwork as "an appalling abuse" of the characters. Eisner agreed to drop the story, but insisted that the music be used. After numerous ideas were scrapped due to the difficulty in writing a clear plot, animator and director
Francis Glebas came up with the Noah's Ark idea that he titled ''Donald's Last Roundup!
, later retitled as Noah's Duck'',
The Firebird . To close the film, Disney wanted a piece that was "emotionally equivalent" to the
Night on Bald Mountain and
Ave Maria segments that closed
Fantasia. Disney chose
The Firebird as the piece to use after "half a dozen" others were scrapped, including
Symphony No. 9 by
Beethoven and the "
Hallelujah Chorus" from
Messiah by
Handel. French twins
Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi from Disney's Paris studio were hired to direct the segment. Her form changes six times; she is introduced as a Water Sprite who plants flowers as a Flower Sprite. She becomes a Neutral Sprite where her growth trail stops and an Ash Sprite when the forest has been destroyed. The segment ends with her as a Rain-Wave Sprite, followed by the Grass Sprite. The segment originally ended with the Sprite in the form of a flowing river that rises up into the sky and transforms into a Sun Sprite, but this was abandoned. The elk's antlers were produced by CGI and placed on top of its body that was drawn traditionally. The segment was produced using Houdini animation software. A recording of James Levine conducting both pieces with the Philharmonia appears on the
film's soundtrack.
Pines of Rome was re-arranged in 1993 by
Bruce Coughlin, who reduced the four-movement piece by cutting the second movement and trimming sections of the third and fourth movements. The piece was recorded on March 28, 1994. and features the
Chicago Symphony Chorus and soprano soloist
Kathleen Battle. The next recording took place on April 24, 1995, for
Piano Concerto No. 2 with pianist
Yefim Bronfman. The piece was arranged using four sections from Stravinsky's
1919 revision of the score.
Interstitials Disney felt the need to keep
interstitials (bridges) as used in
Fantasia to give audiences a chance to "cleanse their emotional palate" from the previous segment while also providing some information about the next one.
Don Hahn directed the live action scenes which were designed by
Pixote Hunt. Hahn came up with the set and backgrounds while eating lunch; he proceeded to sketch a rough idea of what he imagined on a napkin. He "wanted to show images on shapes like big sails of a clipper ship. They fly in on the wind and form a sort of
Stonehenge concert hall in the middle of a vast, empty, imaginary plain". Hahn recalled some difficulty in finding someone to host the film, so the studio decided to use a group of artists and musicians from various fields of entertainment. The interstitials were filmed in various locations; the orchestra, Jones, Lansbury, and Bronfman were shot in Los Angeles, Perlman and Midler in New York City, and others in Boston, Massachusetts. Each scene was filmed in front of a
green screen to allow shots of the orchestra or the set to be placed behind them. The shots of Levine, the artists, and the orchestra were filmed on October 31, 1998. The piano Grierson plays in his scene with Jones is the same one on which he played
Rhapsody in Blue for the soundtrack. ==Release==