Carried away on flights of Fantasia

There's something rather strange in talking to Roy Disney about the history and traditions of the Walt Disney corporation

There's something rather strange in talking to Roy Disney about the history and traditions of the Walt Disney corporation. It's not because of the man himself, a wry, affable 69-year-old with a nice line in self-deprecating humour, but because Roy is so much the spitting image of his late Uncle Walt, the public face of Disney for so many years.

The great studio moguls of the mid-20th century were mostly content to let their stars take the limelight. Most folk would be hardpressed to identify Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner from their photographs, much less their signatures. But over the course of eight decades, the products of the company referred to in film biz circles as "The Mouse" have been so associated with the familiar, moustached face of Walt that it's hard to avoid the feeling that you're talking to the man himself, especially since Roy is widely recognised as the keeper of the family flame.

Without Roy Disney, the animated feature film might be another fading memory of Hollywood's Golden Age, like the musical and the western. It was Roy who believed, in the studio's dog days of the 1970s and early 1980s, that the core Disney activity - the production of animated feature films - was still a commercially viable proposition, and that a return to the values of classical animation could spark a renaissance. And it's Roy who has now brought to the screen a new version of Walt's most cherished animation project, the extraordinary 1940 production, Fantasia.

You get the sense that, for Roy Disney, this is no ordinary film project; it's an affirmation of the family heritage. "Fantasia was always my favourite Disney movie," he says. "You can do things with these short pieces that you can't always do with a feature film. They give the scope to the artists to really express themselves."

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The original Fantasia was the culmination of 15 years of innovation by Disney, in which Walt and his brother Roy (father of the current Roy) had developed increasingly sophisticated animation techniques, moving from early silent shorts through the hugely successful "Silly Symphonies" of the 1930s and into their first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In 1937, as post-production on Snow White was being completed, Walt Disney purchased the rights to French composer Paul Dukas's 1897 tone poem, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, with the intention of using it as the musical basis for an animated cartoon starring Mickey Mouse. As the project developed, Disney's interest in pushing the possibilities of the medium further was reinforced by the input of renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski. Together, the two conceived the idea of a "concert feature", a group of separate numbers, fusing animation and music, brought together in a single feature presentation (it's hardly an accident that the idea developed while Snow White was proving that there was indeed a huge market for animated features).

"There were various reasons why it failed in 1940," says Roy Disney. "Obviously, the fact that war had broken out in Europe didn't help, but there were huge problems and expense with the sound system which had to be installed in every theatre. Disney made history by making Fantasia the first film to be recorded and released in stereo, introducing a new process called `Fantasound', the installation of which in cinemas proved extremely costly, and that contributed to the difficulties".

It was only in 1956 that the film went into profit on its reissue with a magnetic four-track stereo soundtrack. Since then, it has made welcome reappearances in cinemas on a number of occasions: hippy audiences tripped out to its stunning visuals in 1969, and a restored negative was combined with the original Stokowski soundtrack for another successful reissue to mark its 50th anniversary in 1990.

Walt's original conception for Fantasia was that new pieces should be continually produced for a rolling change to the film's programme. The disappointing financial returns, and the bitter strike which followed at the studio the next year, put paid to that plan and it was only in the early 1990s, following the successful release of the restored version on video, that Roy Disney's idea of a Fantasia Continued began to be seriously discussed. At first, the proposal was to keep half of the original film, and produce new pieces for the other half. But, as the project progressed, it was decided to devote much more of the film to new pieces.

Several of the pieces in Fantasia/2000 were actually on the drawing board for the rolling continuation in the 1940s, including Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, SaintSaens's Carnival of the Animals and Stravinsky's Firebird Suite (which Stravinsky sold to Disney within days of seeing the original film's interpretation of his Rites of Spring). Others, Roy Disney admits, are personal favourites which he had always imagined forming part of a new Fantasia. "Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi is a piece of music which has always meant a lot to me personally and my family, and it was one of the first pieces we agreed," he says.

Fans of Fantasia will be glad to know that the new film follows a very similar stylistic and narrative arc to the original. Some of its sequences, in fact, pay overt homage to the visual styles of the 1940s: Eric Goldberg's jazzy New York story for Rhapsody in Blue is based on contemporary caricatures of the period by Al Hirschfeld, while Pixote Hunt's three-minute abstract animation in pastels for Beethoven's Symphony No 5 recalls the abstract sequence for Toccata and Fugue in the 1940 film. After 60 years of having the Fantasia spotlight to himself, Mickey Mouse is joined in the new film by his old rival Donald Duck, who appears in a version of the story of Noah's Ark, set to Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance.

Other sequences blend new animation technologies with classical pieces, such as the version of Shostakovich's Piano Concerto €2, Allegro, Opus 102, in which director Hendel Butoy combines computer-generated figures with traditionally animated backdrops to tell Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, The Steadfast Tin Soldier. Flamingos with yo-yos make an hilarious spectacle out of themselves for Carnival of the Animals, and computer-generated imagery is also used in the whale sequence accompanying Pines of Rome.

Walt Disney's commitment to Fantasia as a groundbreaking spectacle (which included such unfulfilled notions as filling cinemas with the scent of rose petals) are to some extent reflected in the exhibition of the new film. It's appropriate that Fantasia/ 2000 will go on priority release in IMAX cinemas around the world from January 1st, 2000. This is the first time that a theatrical, feature-length film has been released in IMAX, and may be seen in the future as an important landmark for the large-screen format, which up to now has struggled to match its impressive visual impact with appropriately strong content. As a regular visitor to, and sometime resident of Ireland, Roy Disney is particularly pleased that the IMAX cinema on Parnell St in Dublin will be showing the movie. "It was very kind of them to build an IMAX cinema in Dublin, just so we could show Fantasia/2000 there," he chuckles.

Fantasia/2000 opens at the IMAX Cinema, Parnell St, Dublin on January 1st