Abstract
Disney’s animated films continue to exercise an enormous impact on children’s media, both in the USA and in Europe. In this context, not only traditional European fairy tales underwent transformation when Disney adapted them for the screen, but classical myths from Greco-Roman antiquity were also profoundly Americanised in the animated family films. Fantasia (1940), Disney’s experimental feature film, puts eight animated segments in dialogue with European music from the Baroque to the contemporary era, all episodes dealing with the cycle of nature and human attempts to control it. Another recurrent motif in Fantasia seems to be a problematic veiled eroticism, especially visible in the transformations of European pictorial heritage and antique mythological figures. Focusing on central episodes, this chapter examines some aspects of the manifold ‘Disneyfication’ of European texts, myths, arts and music in the film, an endeavour between creative artistic reinvention and cultural appropriation.
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Notes
- 1.
In Willis’s interpretation of Walt Disney’s Los Angeles Suite, the sun stands for God and authority, while the spontaneous power of water has to be controlled by human “rationalization” (1987, 92)—like the Los Angeles “policy of water imperialism” (ibid., 91).
- 2.
Disney’s contempt for highbrow classical music was not overturned by his Fantasia experience, as one can clearly observe in his later feature film The Parent Trap (Swift 1961). Americanising the famous children’s novel Das doppelte Lottchen (1949) by Erich Kästner, the Disney movie inserts—as usual—a musical performance by the reunited twins. On this occasion, the cool California girl Susan interrupts the piano concert of her Boston-raised sister Sharon, declaring Beethoven’s fifth symphony to be too boring (Swift 1961, 01:34:58). The following song Let’s Get Together the twins perform in teenage harmony, however, is a simple Rock’n’ Roll tune, and the choice by no means respects Susan’s proposal to “compromise” (ibid., 01:35:06), to combine their musical skills and traditions in order to create something new. Again, the banal Hollywood formula wins a point, and European music is dismissed as a dull elitist intermezzo.
- 3.
It might be of some interest that Disney mixes up the Greek and Roman names for the gods without any criteria—another evidence of his ignorance and of the mediated reception of the Greco-Roman mythology in popular culture.
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Scherer, L. (2022). From the Old World. In: Dettmar, U., Tomkowiak, I. (eds) On Disney. Studien zu Kinder- und Jugendliteratur und -medien, vol 9. J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64625-0_9
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