Rhapsody on film

Fantasia 2000 (General) Sheridan IMAX Cinema, Parnell Street, Dublin, from tomorrowThe way it used to be in the movies was that the music came last, after the film was shot. Then, in 1940, Walt Disney turned this process on its head when he realised his ambition of complementing classical movie with classical animation in the adventurous Fantasia, which was at its most effective in wedding visual imagery to Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Suite and Moussorgsky's Night On Bald Mountain.

Disney saw it as an ongoing project, but the initial commercial failure of Fantasia put paid to that dream, and it has taken six decades for the sequel to appear, fostered as a labour of love by Roy Disney, Walt's nephew. Arriving at a time when hundreds of short films are devised every year to accompany popular music in the form of pop promos, Fantasia 2000 harks back to its roots with the welcome inclusion of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, starring Mickey Mouse, in a meticulous restoration of picture and soundtrack, and it adds seven new sequences.

The new film is released exclusively in IMAX cinemas around the world for four months from tomorrow before opening in conventional cinemas, and the vast 62' X 82' IMAX screen in Dublin lends itself perfectly to the movie's striking fusion of music and moving animated images. Unfortunately, there were technical problems at the Dublin press preview, caused by interference with the computer system by electrical work in the vicinity, which rendered the two opening sequences silent.

That was all the more unfortunate when what ought to have been silenced were the "host sequences" imposed on each segment. This involves guest presenters introducing each one - some, like Angela Lansbury, with commendable brevity and dignity; others, like Quincy Jones, deigning to inform us that "George Gershwin took jazz off the streets, dressed her up and took her to the concert hall".

Since when has jazz been female? But there was far worse to follow when one half of Penn and Teller, don't ask me which, revealed himself as a boorish loudmouth oaf in introducing The Sorcerer's Apprentice. There really is more than enough entertainment in the eight music-and-animation sequences of Fantasia 2000 in their own right. Simple title cards would have sufficed to link the sequences.

The highlights among those sequences include the striking line drawings in the style of caricaturist Al Hirschfeld which so aptly accompany the aforementioned George Gershwin's wonderful Rhapsody in Blue, and the delightful vignette of a pink flamingo whose yen for yo-yos is frowned upon by fellow flamingos in the visual accompaniment to Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saens.

Fantasia 2000 saves the best wine for last. The penultimate selection, Elgar's stately march, Pomp and Circumstance, which was used so effectively by Stanley Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange, is illustrated in an altogether different context here - as Donald Duck stewards animals in their pairs on to Noah's Ark as the rain pours down, while losing his own partner, Daisy Duck, in the confusion. There is an admirable scale and breadth to the animation in this gorgeous sequence.

The finale is a superbly animated representation of death and rebirth, drawing on traditional hand-drawn techniques and on state-of-the-art computer animation to create the eerie beauty of the images accompanying Stravinsky's soaring The Firebird.