1999 - FANTASIA 2000 - sort of a follow up to FANTASIA

Fantasia 2000 was made due to the involvement of Roy Disney, the nephew of Walt and a major shareholder in the company.  To say that the other Disney executives were not enthused about this project would apparently be an understatement.  Still Roy Disney was a big deal at the Disney company so this film which was basically an update of Fantasia went forward.

Once again the Disney company marshaled their creative and technical staff.  The format was to be the same, musical segments were based on compositions from classical composers such as Beethoven, Respighi, Gershwin, Shostakovich, Saint-Saëns, Dukas, Elgar and Stravinsky.

 

The plan this time was to hire a series of performers to introduce each segment to make the film seem more "hip."  Steve Martin opens the film with a rather tiresome comic bit.  Quincy Jones shows up in his introduction for Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.  Magicians Penn & Tellar do an already dated magic trick.  "Darth Vader" himself James Earl Jones gets a bit and finally Bette Midler introduces some segment which I can't recall.  Sticking all these actors into this film smacked a little like desperation.

The animation was at a very high standard.  When the Disney Corporation put their minds to it, nobody could produce more stunning traditional animation and in his case aided by computer enhancement, than this talented group.

 

This film like the previous Fantasia also did not do especially well with the general public.  The film lost money.  The critical reviews were all over the place and it was clear this wasn't going to be the animation masterpiece Roy Disney had hoped for.  The problem with Fantasia 2000 was that it was for the most part a very boring film.   No amount of elaborate and stunning animation was going to help this film.  Nice try but no cigar as they say.

The film's running time is 76 minutes.

1940 - FANTASIA, Disney's classic animated concert film.

Fantasia was two years in the making. Walt Disney along with conductor Leopold Stokowski decided to aim very high with an animated film that consisted of musical segments created by the Disney organization's talented artists and craftsmen.  The musical segments were to be drawn from  a selection of classical music composers.  At this point the Disney company was at the peak of it's creative powers.  Fantasia was an expensive production with perfection set as the goal.  It was a big ambitious risk for Walt Disney.  

Besides pushing animation to a high level of artistic creativity, Walt Disney also developed an early stereophonic sound system to go with the film which further drove costs  up.  A lot of money was spent on a sound system that had to be installed inside theaters showing this film.  Again, Disney wanted nothing less than perfection for the finished soundtrack in the animated segments.  The excellent live action color photography of Fantasia was photographed by one of Hollywood's top cameramen, James Wong Howe who is surprisingly not credited for his contribution to the film.

The end result was a unique film which featured visual interpretations from composers, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Dukas, Stravinsky, Ponchielli, Mussorgsky and Schubert.  If not all of the musical segments come off (the Beethoven Mount Olympus segment is kind of silly), they are all  spectacular with the animation and special visual effects perfectly blended together.  

 

The plan for the release of the film was to add and replace musical segments every few years which would keep the film in circulation.  Unfortunately the film was so expensive that the initial run didn't really bring in the box office results Disney was looking for.  World War 2 didn't help things as it closed off a lot of foreign markets that would have generated revenue.

Still even with CGI and all the latest technological mumbo jumbo junk that the entertainment industry can muster today.  This film is an amazing achievement when you compare it to the current cookie cutter animated films that are released.

The story credit is given to Joe Grant and Dick Huemer although you can be sure this film is also the result of input from the creative artists and the producer Walt Disney as well.  The running time is  126 minutes.

2006 - PARIS, JE T'AMIE, aka PARIS I LOVE YOU

If you like love stories set in Paris this is the film for you. The catch is that they are only about five minutes long which brings the number of love stories featured in this film to eighteen.  It's safe to say that if you don't care for one short love story another one will come along in a bit.  This film was shot all over Paris by a number of very good directors so it's also a nice tour of the districts of Paris.  My understanding from the special feature included on the DVD is that the directors only had about two days to film their segments but were allowed creative control.

 

This film is well cast and why wouldn't it be.  No actor was stuck on location for months at a time and hey they were in Paris.  It's a mixed cast of British, American and French actors, some I recognized and some I didn't.  The directors were also a mixed bunch as well but they clearly were careful to not let the Parisian landmarks overwhelm their stories.

As far as these love stories go, generally they are pretty good.  Joel and Ethan Coen contribute a short film set in the Paris metro which is one of their typical sourpuss plots with Steve Buscemi as their star/victim.  German director Tom Tyker has a very stylized love story which involves a young Natalie Portman as an actress in love with a blind Parisian student.  Wes Craven of all people does a decent job telling the story of a young woman in the Père Lachaise Cemetery who is infatuated with the writer Oscar Wilde much to her fiancee's irritation.  You get the picture.

 

There is a vampire love story from the underrated but very talented Vincenzo Natali .  Probably the only short film I didn't enjoy was the one about mime artists but I believe it is an accepted fact that nobody can stand mimes.  Towards the end of the film Ben Gazarra and Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes's wife and close friend have a nice bit in a restaurant where they are waited on by Gérard Depardieu. Alexander Payne summons the film up at the end with a touching story.  Actor Margo Martindale plays a middle aged woman visiting Paris for the first time as she narrates a voice over about her love for the city.

A entertaining if unconventional way to tell a series of love stories but considering the production challenges, very well done.  The producers turned this concept into a series of  films set in New York, Berlin and Rio using the same short story approach with apparently diminishing results.

This film has written by Emmanuel Benbihy with input from the various directors.  The running time is 120 minutes.

1981 - HEAVY METAL, the adults only animated film

A series of animated science fiction and fantasy stories based on stories from a magazine called Heavy Metal.  The quality of the animation is extremely variable but the look of the film is interesting for the most part.  The film ties together nine stories with some sort of interconnecting theme of a mysterious green orb that has the power to do evil things or something like that.

Heavy Metal has a lot of vocal talent but it's chief interest for me were some of the performers of the SCTV TV show contributing to the various episodes.  I identified John Candy with his distinctive voice in three of the episodes, Joe Flaherty, Harold Ramis and Eugene Levy are in a couple of the stories.  "Dean Wormer" himself, John Vernon from Animal House and the writer Doug Kenny of Animal House and Caddyshack fame are also in the film.  This casting is probably unsurprising since one of the producers of the film is Ivan Reitman who went on to have a fairly successful career with films like Ghostbusters, Stripes, Twins and Kindergarten Cop .  Reitman had been associated with most of these performers off and on during their careers.

 

OK back to film.  Heavy Metal's reputation rests chiefly on it's blend of nudity, sex and violence.  So if your tolerance for this kind of stuff, particularly in a cartoon format is low, this film is probably not for you.  As I said the film does look interesting and you have to give the production and animation team points for making something different.  

The film has a rock score from Black Sabbath, Blue Oyser Cult, Sammy Hagar, Cheap Trick  DEVO, Journey and Nazareth but I don't recall any of the music particularly standing out.  Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein of all people provided the symphonic score.

 

Heavy Metal has a series of writers and directors but the writer Dan O'Bannon (Dark Star, Alien, Total Recall) is the only person who I recognize.  The running time of this film is 90 minutes which is just fine as a little of this cartoon sex and violence stuff can only go so far in an animated film.