Fantasia (1940) Movie Script
How do you do?
My name is Deems Taylor,
and it's my very pleasant duty
to welcome you here...
on behalf of Walt Disney,
Leopold Stokowski...
and all the other
artists and musicians
whose combined talents
went into the creation
of this new form of
entertainment, "Fantasia"
What you are going to see...
are the designs
and pictures and stories...
that music inspired in the minds
and imaginations...
of a group of artists.
In other words,
these are not going to be...
the interpretations of trained musicians,
Which I think is all to the good.
Tehre are three kinds of music
on this "Fantasia" program.
First there's the kind that tells a definite story.
Then there's the kind, that
while it has no specific plot,
does paint a series of
more or less definite pictures.
Then there's third kind,
music that exists simply for its own sake.
The number that opens
our "Fantasia" program,
the "Toccata and Fugue,"
is music of this third kind--
what we call
"absolute music."
Even the title
has no meaning...
beyond a description
of the from of the music.
What you will
see on the screen..
is a picture of the
various abstract images...
that might pass
through your mind...
if you sat in a concert hall
listening to this music.
At first, you're more or less
conscious of the orchestra,
so our picture opens...
with a series of impressions
of the conductor and players.
Then the music begins to suggest other things...
to your imagination.
The might be...
oh, just masses of color.
Or they may be
cloud forms...
or great landscapes
or vague shadows...
or geometrical objects
floating in space.
So now we present...
the "Toccata and Fugue
in D minor"
by Johann Sebastian Bach,
interpreted in pictures
by Walt Disney and his associates,
and the music by
the Philadelphia Orchestra...
and its conductor Leopold Stokowski.
You know, it's funny...
how wrong an artist can be
about his own work.
Now, the one composition of Tchaikovsky's...
that he really detested...
was his "Nutcracker Suite"
Which is probably the most popular
thing he ever wrote.
It's a series af dances taken out of a
full-length ballet called "The Nutcracker"...
that he once composed
for the St. Petersburg Opera House.
It wasn't much of a success
and nobody performs it nowadays,
but I'm pretty sure you'll recognize
the music of the suite when you hear it.
Incidentally, you won't see
any nutcracker on the screen.
There is nothing like to him
but the title.
Now we're going to hear
a piece of music...
that tells a very definite story.
As a matter of fact, in this case
the story came first...
and the composer wrote the music
to go with it.
It's a very old story,
one that goes back almost 2000 years.
A legend about a sorcerer
who had an apprentice.
He was a bright young lad,
very anxious to learn the business.
As a matter of fact,
he was a little bit too bright,
because he started practising...
some of the boss's best magic tricks...
before learning how to control them.
One day, for instance, when he'd
been told by his master...
to carry water to fill a cauldron,
he had the brilliant idea...
of bringing a broomstick
to life to carry the water for him.
Well, this worked
very well at first.
Unfortunately, however, having forgotten
the magic formula...
that would make the broomstick
stop carrying the water,
he found he' started
something he couldn't finish.
Mr. Stokowski.
Mr. Stokowski.
My congratulations, sir.
Congratulations to you, Mickey.
Gee, thanks.
Well, so long!
I'll be seeing you.
Good-bye.
When Igor Stravinsky wrote his ballet
"The Rite of Spring"...
I repeat, when Igor Stravinsky
wrote his ballet "The Rite of Spring"...
his purpose was in his own words.
"to express primitive life."
So Walt Disney and his fellow artists...
have taken him at his word.
Instead of presenting the ballet
in its original form...
as a simple series of tribal dances,
they've visualised it as a pageant.
as the story of the growth
of life on Earth.
And that story,
as you're going to see it,
isn't the product
of anybody's imagination.
It's a coldly accurate reproduction...
of what science thinks went on
during the first few
billion years of this
planet's existence.
Science, no art, wrote the scenario
of this picture.
According to science,
the first living things here...
were single-celled
organisms
tiny little white or green blobs
of nothing in particular...
that lived
undur the water.
And then as ages passed,
the oceans began to swarm...
with all kinds
of marine creatures.
Finally, after about a billion years,
certain fish, more ambitious
than the rest,
crawled up on land and became
the first amphibians.
And then several hundred
million years ago,
nature went off on another tack
and produced the dinosaurs.
Now, the name "dinosaur"
comes from two Greek words...
meaning "terrible lizard,"
and they were certainly that.
They came in all
shapes and sizes.
From little crawling horrors
about the size of a chicken...
to hundred-ton nightmares.
They were not very bright.
Even thr biggest of them
had only the brain of a pigeon.
They lived in the air
and the water as well as on land.
As a rule, they were
vegetarians,
rather amiable and easy to get along with.
Hoeever, there were bullies
and gangsters among them.
The worst of the lot,
a brute named Tyrannosaurus Rex...
was probably the meanest killer
that ever roamed the earth.
The dinosaurs were lords of creation
for about 200 million years.
And then-- Well, we don't exactly
know what happened.
Some scientists think
that great droughts and earthquakes...
turned the whole world
into a gigantic dustbowl.
In any case, the dinosaurs
were wiped out.
That is where
our story ends.
Where it begins is at a time
infinitely far back...
when there was no life at all on earth,
nothing but clouds of steam
boiling seas...
and exploding volcanoes.
So now, imagine yourselves
out in space...
billions and billions of years ago...
looking down on this lonely,
tormented little planet...
spinning through an empty
sea of nothingness.
Before we get into the
second half of the program,
I'd like to introduce
somebody to you,
somebody who is very important
to "Fantasia."
He is very shy
and very retiring.
I just happened to run accross him
one day at the Disney Studios.
But when I did,
I suddenly realized that he was...
not only an indispensable member of the organization,
but a screen personality whose
possibilities nobody had ever noticed.
So I'm very happy to have this
opportunity to introduce to you
the Soundtrack.
All right, come on.
That's all right.
Don't be timid.
Atta Soundtrack.
Watching him, I discovered
that every beautiful sound
also created an equally
beautiful picture.
Now look.
Will the Soundtrack
kindly produces a sound?
Go on! Don't be nervous.
Go ahead! Any sound.
Well, that isn't quite
what I had in mind.
Suppose we hear and see the harp.
Now one of the strings.
Say, the violin.
Now one of the woodwinds. A flute.
Very pretty.
Now, let's have a brass
instrument, the trumpet.
All right.
Now, how about a low instrument,
the bassoon.
Go on. Go on!
Drop the other shoe, will you
To finish, suppose we see
some of the percussion instruments,
beginning with the base drum.
Thanks a lot, old man.
The symphony that Beethoven called "The Pastoral"
his sixth, is one of the few pieces of music...
he ever wrote that tells
something like a definite story.
He was a great nature lover,
and in this symphony
he paints a musical picture...
of a day in the country.
Of course, the country
that Beethoven described...
was the countryside
with which he was familiar.
But his music covers a
much wider field than that,
and so Walt Disney has given
the "Pastoral Symphony"
a mythological setting.
and that settings is of Mount Olympus,
the abode of the gods.
And here, first of all, we meet o group of fabulous creatures...
of the field and forest--
unicorns, fawns,
Pegasus the flying horse
and his entire family,
the centaurs, those strange creatures
that are half man and half horse...
and their girlfriends,
the centaurettes.
Later on, we meet our old friend
Baccus, the god of wine,
presiding over a baccchanal.
The party is interrupted
by a storm.
and now we see Vulcan
forging thunderbolts...
and handing them over
to the king of all the gods, Zeus.
who plays darts
with them.
As the storm clears, we see Iris,
the goddess of the rainbow...
and Apollo, driving his sun chariot
across the sky.
And then morpheus,
the god of sleep,
covers everything
with his cloak of night...
as Diana, using the new moon
as a bowl,
shoots an arrow of fire
that spangles the sky with stars.
Now we are going to do...
one of the most famous and
popular ballets ever written--
the "Dance of the Hours"...
from Ponchielli's opera "La Gioconda".
It's a pageant of
the hours of the day.
We see first
a group of dancers...
in costumes to suggest
the delicate light of dawn.
Then a second
group enters...
dressed to represent
the brilliant light of noon day.
As these withdraw,
a third group enters...
in costumes that suggest
the delicate tones...
of early evening.
Then a last group,
all in black,
the sommer hours
of the night.
Suddenly, the orchestra bursts
into a brilliant finale...
in wich the hours of darkness...
are overcome
by the hours of light.
All this takes place in the great hall,
with its garden beyond,
of the palace of Duke Alvise,
a Venetian nobleman.
The last number in
our "Fantasia" program...
is a combination of
two pieces of music...
so utterly different in construction and mood
that they set each
other off perfectly.
The first is
"A Night on Bald Mountain"...
by one of Russia's
greatest composers,
Modeste Moussorgsky.
The second is Franz Schubert's
world-famous "Ave Maria."
Musically and dramatically,
we have here a picture...
of the struggle between
the profane and the sacred.
"Bald Mountain,"
according to tradition,
is the gatherin place
of Satan and his followers.
Here on Walpurgisnacht, which is
the equivalent of our own Halloween,
the creatures of evil
gather to worship their master.
Under his spell,
they dance furiously...
until the coming of dawn
and the sounds of church bells...
send the infernal army
slinking back...
into their abodes of darkness.
And then we hear
the "Ave Maria,"
with its message
of the triumph and hope of life...
over the powers
of despair and death.
My name is Deems Taylor,
and it's my very pleasant duty
to welcome you here...
on behalf of Walt Disney,
Leopold Stokowski...
and all the other
artists and musicians
whose combined talents
went into the creation
of this new form of
entertainment, "Fantasia"
What you are going to see...
are the designs
and pictures and stories...
that music inspired in the minds
and imaginations...
of a group of artists.
In other words,
these are not going to be...
the interpretations of trained musicians,
Which I think is all to the good.
Tehre are three kinds of music
on this "Fantasia" program.
First there's the kind that tells a definite story.
Then there's the kind, that
while it has no specific plot,
does paint a series of
more or less definite pictures.
Then there's third kind,
music that exists simply for its own sake.
The number that opens
our "Fantasia" program,
the "Toccata and Fugue,"
is music of this third kind--
what we call
"absolute music."
Even the title
has no meaning...
beyond a description
of the from of the music.
What you will
see on the screen..
is a picture of the
various abstract images...
that might pass
through your mind...
if you sat in a concert hall
listening to this music.
At first, you're more or less
conscious of the orchestra,
so our picture opens...
with a series of impressions
of the conductor and players.
Then the music begins to suggest other things...
to your imagination.
The might be...
oh, just masses of color.
Or they may be
cloud forms...
or great landscapes
or vague shadows...
or geometrical objects
floating in space.
So now we present...
the "Toccata and Fugue
in D minor"
by Johann Sebastian Bach,
interpreted in pictures
by Walt Disney and his associates,
and the music by
the Philadelphia Orchestra...
and its conductor Leopold Stokowski.
You know, it's funny...
how wrong an artist can be
about his own work.
Now, the one composition of Tchaikovsky's...
that he really detested...
was his "Nutcracker Suite"
Which is probably the most popular
thing he ever wrote.
It's a series af dances taken out of a
full-length ballet called "The Nutcracker"...
that he once composed
for the St. Petersburg Opera House.
It wasn't much of a success
and nobody performs it nowadays,
but I'm pretty sure you'll recognize
the music of the suite when you hear it.
Incidentally, you won't see
any nutcracker on the screen.
There is nothing like to him
but the title.
Now we're going to hear
a piece of music...
that tells a very definite story.
As a matter of fact, in this case
the story came first...
and the composer wrote the music
to go with it.
It's a very old story,
one that goes back almost 2000 years.
A legend about a sorcerer
who had an apprentice.
He was a bright young lad,
very anxious to learn the business.
As a matter of fact,
he was a little bit too bright,
because he started practising...
some of the boss's best magic tricks...
before learning how to control them.
One day, for instance, when he'd
been told by his master...
to carry water to fill a cauldron,
he had the brilliant idea...
of bringing a broomstick
to life to carry the water for him.
Well, this worked
very well at first.
Unfortunately, however, having forgotten
the magic formula...
that would make the broomstick
stop carrying the water,
he found he' started
something he couldn't finish.
Mr. Stokowski.
Mr. Stokowski.
My congratulations, sir.
Congratulations to you, Mickey.
Gee, thanks.
Well, so long!
I'll be seeing you.
Good-bye.
When Igor Stravinsky wrote his ballet
"The Rite of Spring"...
I repeat, when Igor Stravinsky
wrote his ballet "The Rite of Spring"...
his purpose was in his own words.
"to express primitive life."
So Walt Disney and his fellow artists...
have taken him at his word.
Instead of presenting the ballet
in its original form...
as a simple series of tribal dances,
they've visualised it as a pageant.
as the story of the growth
of life on Earth.
And that story,
as you're going to see it,
isn't the product
of anybody's imagination.
It's a coldly accurate reproduction...
of what science thinks went on
during the first few
billion years of this
planet's existence.
Science, no art, wrote the scenario
of this picture.
According to science,
the first living things here...
were single-celled
organisms
tiny little white or green blobs
of nothing in particular...
that lived
undur the water.
And then as ages passed,
the oceans began to swarm...
with all kinds
of marine creatures.
Finally, after about a billion years,
certain fish, more ambitious
than the rest,
crawled up on land and became
the first amphibians.
And then several hundred
million years ago,
nature went off on another tack
and produced the dinosaurs.
Now, the name "dinosaur"
comes from two Greek words...
meaning "terrible lizard,"
and they were certainly that.
They came in all
shapes and sizes.
From little crawling horrors
about the size of a chicken...
to hundred-ton nightmares.
They were not very bright.
Even thr biggest of them
had only the brain of a pigeon.
They lived in the air
and the water as well as on land.
As a rule, they were
vegetarians,
rather amiable and easy to get along with.
Hoeever, there were bullies
and gangsters among them.
The worst of the lot,
a brute named Tyrannosaurus Rex...
was probably the meanest killer
that ever roamed the earth.
The dinosaurs were lords of creation
for about 200 million years.
And then-- Well, we don't exactly
know what happened.
Some scientists think
that great droughts and earthquakes...
turned the whole world
into a gigantic dustbowl.
In any case, the dinosaurs
were wiped out.
That is where
our story ends.
Where it begins is at a time
infinitely far back...
when there was no life at all on earth,
nothing but clouds of steam
boiling seas...
and exploding volcanoes.
So now, imagine yourselves
out in space...
billions and billions of years ago...
looking down on this lonely,
tormented little planet...
spinning through an empty
sea of nothingness.
Before we get into the
second half of the program,
I'd like to introduce
somebody to you,
somebody who is very important
to "Fantasia."
He is very shy
and very retiring.
I just happened to run accross him
one day at the Disney Studios.
But when I did,
I suddenly realized that he was...
not only an indispensable member of the organization,
but a screen personality whose
possibilities nobody had ever noticed.
So I'm very happy to have this
opportunity to introduce to you
the Soundtrack.
All right, come on.
That's all right.
Don't be timid.
Atta Soundtrack.
Watching him, I discovered
that every beautiful sound
also created an equally
beautiful picture.
Now look.
Will the Soundtrack
kindly produces a sound?
Go on! Don't be nervous.
Go ahead! Any sound.
Well, that isn't quite
what I had in mind.
Suppose we hear and see the harp.
Now one of the strings.
Say, the violin.
Now one of the woodwinds. A flute.
Very pretty.
Now, let's have a brass
instrument, the trumpet.
All right.
Now, how about a low instrument,
the bassoon.
Go on. Go on!
Drop the other shoe, will you
To finish, suppose we see
some of the percussion instruments,
beginning with the base drum.
Thanks a lot, old man.
The symphony that Beethoven called "The Pastoral"
his sixth, is one of the few pieces of music...
he ever wrote that tells
something like a definite story.
He was a great nature lover,
and in this symphony
he paints a musical picture...
of a day in the country.
Of course, the country
that Beethoven described...
was the countryside
with which he was familiar.
But his music covers a
much wider field than that,
and so Walt Disney has given
the "Pastoral Symphony"
a mythological setting.
and that settings is of Mount Olympus,
the abode of the gods.
And here, first of all, we meet o group of fabulous creatures...
of the field and forest--
unicorns, fawns,
Pegasus the flying horse
and his entire family,
the centaurs, those strange creatures
that are half man and half horse...
and their girlfriends,
the centaurettes.
Later on, we meet our old friend
Baccus, the god of wine,
presiding over a baccchanal.
The party is interrupted
by a storm.
and now we see Vulcan
forging thunderbolts...
and handing them over
to the king of all the gods, Zeus.
who plays darts
with them.
As the storm clears, we see Iris,
the goddess of the rainbow...
and Apollo, driving his sun chariot
across the sky.
And then morpheus,
the god of sleep,
covers everything
with his cloak of night...
as Diana, using the new moon
as a bowl,
shoots an arrow of fire
that spangles the sky with stars.
Now we are going to do...
one of the most famous and
popular ballets ever written--
the "Dance of the Hours"...
from Ponchielli's opera "La Gioconda".
It's a pageant of
the hours of the day.
We see first
a group of dancers...
in costumes to suggest
the delicate light of dawn.
Then a second
group enters...
dressed to represent
the brilliant light of noon day.
As these withdraw,
a third group enters...
in costumes that suggest
the delicate tones...
of early evening.
Then a last group,
all in black,
the sommer hours
of the night.
Suddenly, the orchestra bursts
into a brilliant finale...
in wich the hours of darkness...
are overcome
by the hours of light.
All this takes place in the great hall,
with its garden beyond,
of the palace of Duke Alvise,
a Venetian nobleman.
The last number in
our "Fantasia" program...
is a combination of
two pieces of music...
so utterly different in construction and mood
that they set each
other off perfectly.
The first is
"A Night on Bald Mountain"...
by one of Russia's
greatest composers,
Modeste Moussorgsky.
The second is Franz Schubert's
world-famous "Ave Maria."
Musically and dramatically,
we have here a picture...
of the struggle between
the profane and the sacred.
"Bald Mountain,"
according to tradition,
is the gatherin place
of Satan and his followers.
Here on Walpurgisnacht, which is
the equivalent of our own Halloween,
the creatures of evil
gather to worship their master.
Under his spell,
they dance furiously...
until the coming of dawn
and the sounds of church bells...
send the infernal army
slinking back...
into their abodes of darkness.
And then we hear
the "Ave Maria,"
with its message
of the triumph and hope of life...
over the powers
of despair and death.