Meanwhile, Geppetto, his cat Figaro and goldfish Cleo, distraught over the missing boy, had set out to sea to search for him, only to be swallowed by a giant whale named Monstro. Pinocchio, determined to rescue his family, follows them into the beast’s belly and devises an escape in which the smoke from a fire forces the whale to sneeze them out. They all wash up on a beach, but Pinocchio’s wooden body is lifeless until the Blue Fairy, deciding he has proven himself, brings him back as a real boy. Jiminy Cricket, as a reward for his service, is pinned with the solid gold badge of an official “conscience,” and outfitted in proper, new clothes.
More than
Snow White
, the villains of Disney’s
Pinocchio
are a fearsome bunch – from the satirical adult predators Honest John and Gideon to the terrifying Monstro. A morality tale teaching children the benefits of hard work and middle-class values,
Pinocchio
dramatically overstates the consequences of bad behavior.
Pinocchio
opened in New York on February 7, 1940. Five months before the world premiere, Germany had invaded Poland, and World War II was on.
Still, Disney and his new distributor, RKO, had high hopes. The critics reinforced them with raves.
Frank Nugent
of
The New York Times
declared
Pinocchio
superior to
Snow White
in every way but its score - a minor complaint. The film, Nugent said, was “the best thing Mr. Disney has done and therefore the best cartoon ever made.” The film’s real star, he wrote, was Jiminy Cricket. The cricket was smart and chirpy, the opposite of Dopey, the fan-favorite
Snow White
dwarf. Critics also praised the quality of animation
.
Time
magazine called it “in every respect except its score, (Disney’s) best. In craftsmanship and delicacy of drawing and coloring, in the articulation of its dozens of characters, in the greater variety and depth of its photographic effects, it tops the high standard
Snow White
set. The charm, humor and loving care with which it treats its inanimate characters puts it in a class by itself.”
But the good reviews turned out to be the only good news for
Pinocchio
, which failed to draw the sizeable audiences
Snow White
had. Disney lost money on his $2.6 million investment. Part of the problem was the timing of its release, which at the start of World War II kept it from reaching European markets. Despite the fact that Jiminy’s “When You Wish Upon a Star,” won an Academy Award for Best Original Song, the mood at Disney was gloomy.
In the mid-1930s, Disney decided Mickey Mouse was getting stale. Mickey was a blank slate - a character without character. The studio was working more personality into its cartoons, and the fact that Mickey had no real personality made it harder to come up with material for him. Mickey Mouse, the character and the franchise, needed a fresh start. Disney’s solution was to cast Mickey in a
Silly Symphony
musical dream sequence called
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
, based on a 1797
poem
by
Johann Wolfang von Goethe
, and set to music composed by
Paul Dukas
. The story is simple but transfixing. An old sorcerer retires for the day, leaving his apprentice to clean up the workshop. The apprentice employs magic he doesn’t fully command to get a broom to do his work, and chaos ensues as the apprentice is unable to control the supernatural forces he lets loose.
Disney looked around for a conductor to record the music for
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
and found one in a chance meeting at
Chasen’s
restaurant in Hollywood in 1937.
Leopold Stokowski
,
the renowned leader of the Philadelphia Orchestra, was so enthusiastic about the project he offered to do the job gratis.
With the music in place, Disney wanted to make Mickey more appealing. He turned to Fred Moore, who had imbued the
Three Little Pigs
with such life and charm. Moore gave Mickey a softer, plumper body and a fuller, more expressive face. The change was subtle but dramatic. Mickey became less rodent-like and more child-like. He was cute.
Work on
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
commenced in late 1937. Disney told his team to think more artistically, and to stay away from slapstick. The gags, he instructed, should be more graceful and subtle. Disney was bowled over in January 1938, when Stokowski arrived in Los Angeles with eighty-five musicians to record the score. Stokowski also had an idea to expand the project. He proposed making
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
only one segment of a full-length feature film, with other pieces of music matched to animated sequences illustrating each musical mood. Although Disney was heavily extended with
Pinocchio
and
Bambi
, he jumped at the idea. Their working title for the new project was
The Concert Feature.
Disney had been interested in making an animated film that revolved around music rather than narrative since adapting the Danse Macabre for 1929’s
Skeleton Dance
. He also needed to recoup the skyrocketing cost of
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Standard Disney shorts were generally produced in two weeks; production on
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
was expected to take the better part of a year and cost more than $150,000.
The Concert Feature
made more sense, but it would be expensive. Stokowski’s original offer to conduct the score for the short for free had been amended to give him a percentage of the profits. The new contract gave him $125,000 to record the score for
The Concert Feature
and to appear in live-action sequences as himself.
Disney and Stokowski called composer
Deems Taylor
, who flew in from Manhattan, and rounded up Disney’s sound engineer
Bill Garrity
, and together they selected symphonies from Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Schubert. Contemporary composers
Paul Hindemith
,
Serge Prokofiev
and
William Grant Still
joined the production. As Disney’s $3-million Burbank, Calif., studio buzzed with the activity of its 1,200 artists, animators and engineers, Stokowski went to the Philadelphia Academy of Music, where he would conduct his own Philadelphia Orchestra for the other segments.
Disney obsessed with making the sound as realistic as possible, collaborated with RCA to develop a system using multiple soundtracks and speakers to the left, right, and center of the theater. Disney called it
Fantasound
. Garity invented the system for recording each section of the orchestra on a separate track, and splicing it so that in final production, it surrounded the audience. To make it work, Stokowski and Garity recorded 430,000 feet of sound track, which was cut and braided down to 11,953 feet. The equipment cost Disney and RCA $85,000; the total cost of the recordings exceeding $200,000. But it was a smart investment: The engineers had done for sound what Technicolor had done for visuals.
Next, it was up to Disney’s animators to match action to the music. Many who had never attended a classical concert in their lives found themselves whistling and humming to Bach and Beethoven as the compositions were repeated as many as 700 times. Disney insisted on a refinement and realism to surpass the typical Mickey cartoon. He wanted audiences to be startled, rather than amused.
For
Igor Stravinsky
’s avant-garde “
Rite of Spring
,”
a cataclysmic scene depicting the formation of the earth and the appearance of life on the planet through the time of dinosaurs was imagined. Disney animators studied comets and nebulae at Los Angeles’s Mount Wilson Observatory, and spent hours at Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History, where the curriculum included prehistoric beasts, protozoic life, and the properties of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. One zealous Disney animator was arrested by suspicious police who observed him lying on his back on an L.A. sidewalk during a lightning storm to study the flashes. The team consulted experts like paleontologist
Barnum Brown
, famous for discovering the first documented remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex in 1902. Animators analyzed the movements of iguanas and an alligator roaming the Disney lot while Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
thundered so blaringly that this group had to be quarantined so as not to disturb the others.
Fantasia
, as film was eventually called, comprised eight animated musical sequences interspersed with back-lit live-action scenes of Stokowski and his orchestra. Deems Taylor, the grinning, balding live-action master of ceremonies, introduced the program, calling it “an entirely new form of entertainment.”
Fantasia
opens with the orchestra playing Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” to swirling patterns, lines, shadows and cloud formations that react to the beat and tempo of the music. Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite” ballet danced by flowers, fairies, fish, falling leaves, and a small, slant-eyed mushroom named Hop Low who can’t keep up with his larger counterparts. Next, Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” features the rejuvenated Mickey Mouse. Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” is followed by an intermission, and then the orchestra to play Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony” at a festival to honor the god of wine, Bacchus. The party, attended by cherubs, cupids, centaurs, and scantily-clad centaurettes, is interrupted by an enraged Zeus, who scatters the crowd of mythological creatures by hurling lightning bolts at them.
Amilcare Ponchielli
‘s “
Dance of the Hours
”
is a colorful comic ballet with dancing hippos, elephants, and alligators. Susan, the principal hippo ballerina, and Ali Gator, premiere dancer of the ostrich ballet, literally tear up the dance hall. The scene for Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s “Spooky Night on Bald Mountain” snakes through a graveyard inhabited by ghosts and ghouls on flying brooms. Disney’s animators collaborated with Danish fairy-tale illustrator Kay Nielsen on this segment, a stand-out among
Fantasia’s
best acts.
Fantasia
ran more than two hours, with an intermission, and included some 500 animated characters. Distributor RKO was nervous; worried executives believed it was a “longhair musical” that would not keep cartoon lovers in their seats. RKO and Disney decided to open
Fantasia
in a number of “roadshow” engagements that would include twice-daily screenings, each with a fifteen-minute intermission. In New York, Disney decided to open
Fantasia
at the Broadway Theatre, formerly the Colony Theater, where he had introduced Mickey Mouse to the world. Disney installed Fantasound at the Broadway, hired ushers, printed a program, and opened a telephone bank for advance ticket sales. Demand was huge.
On November 13, 1940, despite a steady downpour in Manhattan,
Fantasia
opened to a full house. Critics’ reviews were mixed.
Bosley Crowther
, writing for
The
New York Times,
claimed that motion-picture history had been made.
Fantasia
, he wrote, dumped “conventional formulas overboard,” and boldly revealed the scope of Disney’s imagination. The
Times’
music critic Olin Downes panned the pairing of classical music with cartoons, writing that “No good is accomplished by trying to scramble different arts together.”
The film fared better with critics when it opened the following month at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. The Circle, named for its unique auditorium that formed a perfect circle and extended vertically into a cylindrical seating plan, was trimmed in blue, capped with a tall bell tower and a neon marquee that could be seen for miles. A star-studded audience of 5,000 included
Cecil B. DeMille
,
James Cagney
, and Shirley Temple.
Los Angeles Times
critic Edward Schallert called
Fantasia
a wonderful and “courageous” film that would appeal to both middle-brow and high-brow moviegoers. Isabel Morse Jones, the
Times
’ music critic, thought the film was a “dream” brimming with imaginative and seductive “pictorial ideas.”
Disney’s collaborators were thrilled. Stravinsky signed a contract with the studio for future projects, and other composers vowed a lifetime commitment to Disney, if needed.
Fantasia
played to packed houses at the Broadway in New York for more than a year. Experts at a private showing at The New York Academy of Sciences marveled at the depictions of dinosaurs in Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Its thirty-nine week run at the Carthay smashed the record set by
Gone with the Wind
. The movie sold out even in smaller cities - some 50,000 people saw it in Pittsburgh. But even in eleven “roadshow” stops during
Fantasia’s
first year-and-a-half of release, the film grossed only $1.3 million. It cost $1 million more to make.
Installations of the complicated Fantasound systems meant that
Fantasia
could only screen in twelve theaters at a time, making it more like a touring stage production than a wide theatrical release. Disney played to this similarity, hiring a salesman named Irving Ludwig to manage the first of these engagements, down to the marquee setup, curtain and lighting cues. Disney also hired ushers to escort theatergoers to their seats and distribute programs illustrated by children’s book author
Gyo Fujikawa
. Despite the dramatic debut, it became clear
Fantasia
was going to lose even more money than
Pinocchio.
As the financial problems with
Fantasia
mounted, Roy believed the studio, which now had 1,500 employees, was facing bankruptcy. The Disneys owed their bankers $4.5 million. The brothers laughingly congratulated each other on being successful enough to owe that much money. “Just imagine,” Walt Disney said in response to Roy’s recitation of their debts, “a couple of rubes from Kansas City being in a position to owe the Bank of America all that money.” There had been a time when no one would have loaned them $1,000, but their current obligations were a bigger problem for the creditors than for the studio. The banks, after all, were the ones who were out the money.