Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 3 ratings
Walt Disney's timeless masterpiece is an extravaganza of sight and sound! See the music come to life, hear the pictures burst into song and experience the excitement that is Fantasia over and over again.
Fantasia is one of cinema's most singular achievements — a bold experiment marrying classical music to animation with no conventional narrative structure. Its Cinematography (animation artistry) is genuinely exceptional: sequences like The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Night on Bald Mountain remain breathtaking visual achievements. Novelty is very high; no studio before or since attempted this kind of sustained abstract concert-film format at such ambition and scale. Plot scores low because the film deliberately eschews conventional storytelling — it's a collection of vignettes, some abstract, some narrative, and coherence isn't its goal. Acting is similarly limited by design; most segments are purely visual with no dialogue. The Ending (Ave Maria segueing from Bald Mountain) is hauntingly beautiful but somewhat anticlimactic after the ferocity that precedes it, landing solidly above average rather than exceptional.