Fantasia (1940), a Disney animated feature-length “concert” film milestone, is an experimental film integrating eight magnificent classical musical compositions with enchanting, exhilarating, and imaginative, artistically-choreographed animation. The conceptual framework of the individual pieces embraces such areas as prehistoric times, the four seasons, nature, hell/heaven, the themes of light vs. darkness and chaos vs. order, dancing animals, classical mythology, and legend.
By the late 1930s, Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse was losing his popularity with movie audiences. The Mickey Mouse cartoon shorts series had spawned the spin-off Donald Duck series, which was proving to be more popular and profitable than the former, but Walt Disney wasn’t ready to give up on his favorite character and devised a special short that would be produced as a “comeback” film for Mickey Mouse.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, based on Goethe’s balladic poem Der Zauberlehrling (1797), was planned as a special Mickey Mouse short and would be completely silent save for the program music by Paul Dukas, L’apprenti sorcier (1897). The story artists who developed The Sorcerer’s Apprentice originally suggested Dopey from Snow White for the title role, but Disney insisted upon using Mickey.
As work began on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in 1938, Disney happened to meet famed conductor Leopold Stokowski at Chasen’s, a noted Hollywood restaurant. Stokowski offered to serve as conductor for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice at no charge, and assembled over one-hundred professional musicians in Los Angeles to record the score for the nine-minute cartoon.
