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I really hate Disney DVDs. Mainly because they are so AGGRESSIVELY branded as "Disney DVDs," like it's some sort of proprietary media format or something. Also because they just bombard you with so many ads and forms of branding ("This DVD features FastPlay(TM)!") that there's really just this mandatory period of making you hate the company before you watch what you want to watch. Plus they have this disturbing habit of doing these short print runs before throwing everything back into "The Disney Vault" that the same inappropriate features will be on any Disney movie you rent, no matter how old it is. Anyway, today that would be Fantasia 2000. The original is still recognized by a huge number of people as the most dignified animated feature ever to be released. This is largely due to the fact that these people refuse to acknowledge anyone besides Disney has ever made an animated feature. Let's see how we're dishonoring its memory!
Well, we start off with rendered sheets of paper floating by with scenes from the original Fantasia on them and a portion of the original opening narration... and actually we seem to be just directly ripping off the really abstract opening of Fantasia here, but redoing it so that we've got.... butterflies made of doritos? Seriously, these aren't just orange triangles. Those are clearly textured to resemble doritos. One just had a bite taken out of it. Cheesy crumbs went flying. And now space lasers are killing the evil black butterflies.
And now ladies and gentlemen, Steve Martin. Uh, what? Seriously. Live action Steve Martin. Just kinda hamming it up here. For... no good reason I can think of. He's kind of introducing our new orchestra here and talking some about how the original Fantasia was cool, but was supposed to be updated constantly and @#$%ed with. Anyway, moving into segment 2 now, oh hey it's the whale one. Everyone seems to agree that this is the one segment of this that's actually pretty good, and, yeah, there's some degree of dignity here. Just classical music and realistic animated whales leaping out of the arctic ocean and flying around, with one being a cartooonish baby whale messing with seagulls. Because, honestly, @#$% seagulls. Here's what bugs me though. The adults? Totall realistic whales. Nothing cartoony about them, barnacles all over, al that. But... they have cartoon character eyes. You don't see them much but they don't fit. They ook OK on the baby, but there you have way too much texture detail. Anyway, baby got himself trapped in this ice cave and it's kind of giving me a traumatic Ecco the Dolphin flashback. Be careful! There are giant frelling crabs hiding behind those spikey chunks! Seriously though, this is pretty visually impressive and set to appropriate music here. Which is impressive, because this is computer animation from 2000 and that does not generally hold up well. The trick is mainly focusing on water, which works out, and, and this is important, using hand drawn animation to cover up the parts that look bad. Take note people, this is a thing to do.Anyway, we now have a few hundred whales all flying out to the uh... conveniently located tropical island right by the north pole, and then breaching the clouds some. Yeah, this here? This is some pretty serious college poster art stuff here. Now we're cutting through some torm clouds and.... breaking the surface of the uh... thin layer of water that holds in the earth's atmosphere.
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And once again, Steve- Oh nope. That's... is that Quincy Jones? I feel I should know who this is. Oh hey! The Critic's on! Or we're just drawing the New York skyline set to Rhapsody in Blue for some unrelated reason. And... I was just about to compliment the art style here for doing this monotone sketchy Pink Panter cartoon sorta deal, but then it kinda got all racist. We've got this wacky black guy drawn in this super exaggerated style with huge feat and some crazy abstract mess of a nose, and... I might have been able to accept that, but here's a bunch of other characters drawn in the sort of art style that fits in just fine with the overall aesthetic, and... yeah, that doesn't come off well. Anyway, we were following this guy around a bit, but now we're focusing on this clutsy little kid instead. We don't really seem to have any plot here, just wandering aimlessly about depression era New York I guess. It's getting increasingly predictable and generic and it's making me wish I was watching The Triplets of Belleville instead. Oh, now everyone is wishing they were skating. Like, in turn. Everyone the camera has spent time on gets their own mopey skating fantasy. Uh... I'm kind of out of things to say about you second sketch. You want to go ahead and end? Oh OK, now we're going for some kind of City of Lost Children chain reaction leaving everyone happier. Oy! Fantasia 2000! Quit reminding me of much better French movies I'm not sure if you predate!
... Bette Midler? What is with these RANDOM CELEBRITY INTRO SECTIONS? Huh. This is interesting though. Salvador Dali apparently wanted to contribute something to Fantasia but it was cut. Uh... really? Was he just, like, randomly hanging out at Disney's studio that day or something? That doesn't sound right? Anyway yeah, lots of stuff didn't make the cut that sounded neat. Now here, watch this creepy bad CG nutcracker knockoff. This tin Soldier with one leg wants to bang this here wind-up ballerina apparently. You know, this is the second time they've randomly thrown ballerinas in there. I'm really fighting the urge to make some forced Black Swan reference, because I literally just saw it before sitting down to do this. Really though what I'm mainly getting is man, #$%@ those Pixar dudes. They should have had some evil toy kidnap the princess toy and need to be rescued by some prince-ish toy. That's how you do a kid's movie! Let's one-up them in our contribution to the new Fantasia thing! Also, we're calling this The Tin Soldier, but he's... clearly floating there. Also, is this really only from the year 2000? Some of this CG stuff looks almost as good as stuff from Futurama... hey wait. Futurama started before this movie came out. Why does Futurama's CG stuff look so frelling good while everyone else is still at about the level seen here? This is really odd in retrospect. Also, seriously, this whole bit is SUCH a lame going through the motions generic disney formula thing.
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Ooh, James Earl Jones! How are you doing? Also, why did you agree to lend your voice to George Lucas' 3rd terrible Star Trek prequel? Or Disney's shameless blatant Kimba knockoff for that matter? At least his intro to this next piece is calling it garbage. Seriously. "What would happen if you gave a yo-yo to a flock of flamingos? ... Who wrote this?" Direct quote. Totally indignant. Probably fake indignant, but no, that really was just stupid and pointless. At least it was like a minute long if that.
Now here's Penn and Teller? Dear gods, really? I like them well enough but it's a brand of comedy that really doesn't belong anywhere near Disney. Oh and now we seem to just be straight-up recycling The Sorcerer's Apprentice. It's like, hey! Sorry this sequel has been such a huge let-down so far. Tell yo what, why don't we just watch the actual good movie for a while as a breather? Uh... do I need to comment on this? Well, I can mention that I always mix this up with The Sword in the Stone which left me believing that recent Disney movie that lifted the title was trying some kind of terrible Arthur Legend modernization deal. Instead it was just lifting the title of a famous short for no real good reason. Oh yeah, I forgot the bit where Mickey astrally projects out of his body to command the very heavens for a while and destroy large portions of the universe. Or has some crazy power fantasy dream really, but that's what the dream is about! Come to think of it, Mickey Mouse is pretty consistently a jerk in everything isn't he. And here he's also an axe murderer. You know, this actually kinda takes on a bit of a horror vibe right around here. Also, how come some brooms keep marching underwater to "pour" their buckets where originally instructed and others just go @#$% it and dump it off the edge of the stairs? That really doesn't make any sense. But yeah, basically done here. Let's see which random celebrity gets picked next. I'm going to guess... Winona Ryder.
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Oh dear. We're mixing the old with the new and stripping dignity from the dead. Can we not do this? This is embarrassing for everybody. Apparently we're going to use Donald Duck for some kind of Noah's Ark thing now. This is kinda creepy actually. First off it's weirdly religious, second I think we're straight up recycling some lion king footage. Oh wait, are we going to do this? This thing where all the other animals are animals but the ducks are cartoon ducks? And... dear gods! Donald Duck was just naked. I mean, I thought they were trying to use him like some kind of actual duck for a second, but... then he panicked and got dressed in embarrassment. Oh and he's not one of the two ducks. There's two actual realistic ducks for that so... what the hell? He and his girlfriend here are just the two humanoid ducks? Separate species? Aside from how unsettling that already is, I notice the realistic male duck has proper male duck coloring going on. You know with the bright green head and all that? Like in Duck Hunt? Donald's either some kind of weird freak albino duck, or has some sort of gender ambiguity going on here. As does Howard for that matter.
And... uh... what's her name. The Murder She Wrote lady. She's introducing the... last bit? That was kinda quick. Wow that vaguely racist segment kinda ran long compared to these others. So OK, here's some caribou, giving the breathe of life to a chunk of ice, turning it into a nereid. Oh @$#% you spell check go study mythology! So yeah, the nereid then flies all over like some kindly water wraith and spreads life all over, doing the whole spring thing. Then it sees a big crater with Lavos in it. Uh... I was kidding? She just spread life to freaking Lavos. Oh no wait, it was just the egg of some kinda lava bird I guess. As in, bird made of lava. Or maybe this is an anthropomorphized volcano. Anyway, it's pure evil and wants to kill the nereid in particular, but to some extent, also everything else. OK this segment also seems to be actually pretty decent. You can tell it's artsy because everything in sight is now dead and clouds of ash choke the air and stuff. Except of course for Our Reindeer Lord here. Only way to kill him is with a gun don't you know. Ge goes and revives his nereid, presumably to chew her the #$@% out for royally @#$%ing up this whole spring deal here. So he scoops her up, and she's crying, and her tears soring forth new life, which makes her happy, so she stops crying. Uh... That was only like, 2 plants there. Oh OK< now we're going all tidal wavey and raining over he whole place to fix stuff. Sure. Remember this moral kids. If you totally @#$% up, and then cry about it, everything goes back to normal and you don't need to make any real effort to fix it.
So that was that. Now the credits roll over the orchestra slowly packing up their stuff and wandering out of the room. So that had it's moments, but yeah, really more the sort of thing you should just watch clips of on youtube than see in full.
