Fantasia

Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) is the fourth film on my list of fifty. When I saw it as a child on the big screen it made a big impression on me, and when I saw it again as a teenager, once more on the big screen, it continued to impress me. Today, I am still impressed only by the first segment: the orchestration of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue. At the other extreme, the segment about the hippos dancing with crocodiles is too grotesque and should have been replaced by Debussy’s Clair de Lune segment. This was developed as part of the original Fantasia programme. After being fully animated (watch it here) it was removed from the final film to shorten its length!

In my recent post on the first chapter of Simms’ book on Hitler, I said that young Adolf would go far because he was initiated into art; and that without art it is impossible for contemporary racialists to reach his level. From that point of view, one might think that Fantasia could serve as an initiation to classical music for the Aryan child. But things are a little more complex.

If one looks closely at the festivities of the National Socialists, say in Munich, they were permeated with a paganism that is absent in Fantasia. The segment of the film in which the Disney Studios used Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony with Greco-Roman mythology would have come across as too cloying and childish to the Teutonic palate, more imbued with the Roman severitas of the Republic than the dissipation of imperial Rome. And while the animation of the amalgamation of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain with Schubert’s Ave Maria is artistically very well done, it makes too many concessions to Christianity, including those seconds when the devil Chernabog throws souls into hellfire.

At midnight Chernabog awakes and summons evil spirits
and restless souls from their graves to Bald Mountain.

In other words: both the pseudo-Greco-Roman paganism of Disney Studios’ Pastoral and the Christian motifs of the Mussorgsky-Schubert animation aren’t exactly healthy for the child who is to be introduced to genuine Aryan art.

It is very difficult to pronounce myself on this matter, while in the West there is much splendid art which has the misfortune that has been used as propaganda for unwholesome messages (see for example what I say about Bach and Wagner on pages 149-156 of Daybreak). Bach himself, whom I said above is the only segment of Fantasia that still impresses me and which I openly recommend, I sometimes view with great reserve.

For example, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s orchestration of the Toccata in Fantasia, originally written for organ, is not only truly magnificent but detracts from the ominous charge we hear in churches: something like paganising Christian music. This also happened to me with a piece of Bach’s music we don’t hear in Fantasia, the Partita No. 2 for solo violin, which I find extremely disturbing and ominous on violin but which, when performed on classical guitar, miraculously takes away all that burden of Christian obscurantism, typical of the Reformation ethos in which the Protestants of Bach’s time were still living.

In a nutshell, it is difficult to recommend Disney films without reservation for the education of the Aryan child, including Fantasia. On the internet I have just read the following:

Disney WWII Propaganda Emerges As Part of the War Effort

Walt Disney and his staff were no exception, and with [his] Studios commandeered by the military on December 8, 1941, they soon found themselves entrenched in the ongoing war effort. Of the dozens of training, propaganda, and educational films Walt and his staff made over the next four years of the war, none reached the popularity of the Donald Duck short Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943), in which the irascible duck takes on the role of a munitions factory worker in “Nutzi Land”…

Walt himself would later recall the popularity of the film: “[It] was the most popular propaganda film we had. It was put in all languages. They had it in the Underground. The Underground were running it and were getting a good laugh out of it while they were under the heel of Hitler, you know?”

If Hitler and not these morons had won the war, we can already imagine the kind of animation art that would have captured the imagination of the Aryan childhood.