Last night I set the dubious record of being stood up no less than four times by two different dates (and I thought double booking the evening would spare me the indignity of being alone on a Saturday night). After waiting by the telephone and frantically calling the dates’ respective cell-phones, work, home, friends, relatives and manicurists, I finally gave up and decided to go to a movie, Fantasia 2000, playing at an IMAX theatre near you.
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Near. Well, in a manner of speaking. The theatre is exactly 12 kilometres from my apartment (I can see the building from my balcony.), and exactly across downtown from me. I thought, naturally, that any of five major highways that pass near my place would quickly take me to the IMAX complex, so I dilly-dallied, moped around, felt sorry for myself for having been stood up, called the dates’ internists and divorce lawyers, and having failed at nailing down my dates – and of course frustrated that I was not going to nail them either – I gave up and ten minutes before the start of the movie I set out in the direction of the great IMAX screen and Fantasia 2000.
Imagine my surprise, gentle reader, when I looked at the map and found out, to my shock, horror and dismay – OK I exaggerate – that I had to go through the city, on normal city streets, to get to the famous theatre. I won’t bore you – not, at least, more than I have already – with the details of how I got lost smack in the middle of the red-light district (get your minds out of the gutter), made a dozen illegal left and U-turns, ran two red lights, and finally, 30 minutes late, parked the car on the sidewalk and ran in to find out how much of the movie I had missed. Well, I had made an error and was just in time. Ticket, seat, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and disappointment all happened in such a flash that I had hardly time to catch my breath. Soon boredom set in and to divert myself I started counting how many times a minutes I was breathing. To relieve the tedium, I was itching to call my dates’ parole officers, but decided instead to busy myself with my Chinese finger puzzle – always handy at times like this.
I can’t tell you exactly what was wrong with the movie. By now, you will have read ad nauseam about the unfinished project that the first Fantasia was, how they wanted to have different versions of it and how the project never got off the ground until the phenomenal success of the restored version in the 80s, etc. etc. I shan’t bore you with all that. Suffice it to say that Fantasia 2000 has neither the charm nor the panache of the original. In fact, it is painfully banal. Perhaps this only reflects our own times ….
The original, if you recall, began with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, with abstract light and colour representations to illustrate the music. 2000 purports to begin similarly, this time with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. However, the images soon lose their abstraction and turn into a good versus evil, colour versus darkness, butterfly versus vulture representation. My first reaction would be to suggest that the music was at war with the images – the first movement of the Fifth Symphony does not evoke a good versus evil image in my mind. But that would be quibbling. At a deeper level I am bothered by the fact that what was purported to be abstract ended up being so concrete and value-laden. That too would be quibbling. The images were simply not compelling.
The images in the next segment, based on Respighi’s Pines of Rome, were much more so, but still unsatisfying. Humpback whales breaching, and then slowly flying over the ocean and icebergs, a little baby whale getting trapped inside the iceberg, and then entire pods of whales taking to the sky, going through the clouds and breaching in space … Interesting, except that, I thought, the writers of this segment had seen Star Trek IV too many times. Besides, whales are singularly uncute. Don’t get me wrong, I like whales. In fact, some of my best friends are whales. It’s just that whales are majestic, weighty, grave, graceful – but not cute. And in a cartoon like Fantasia, you need cute, like the baby winged horses, or the dancing mushrooms, or even the sugarplum fairies of the first Fantasia. Not too cute, mind – but at least some cute. I think a baby dolphin would have worked better. Other types of whales would have distracted me not to think of Star Trek.
I could go on. The yoyo-playing flamingo is nowhere near as interesting or inventive as the hippos in tutus of the original. There is nothing as enchanting as the Waltz of the Flowers or the Arabic dance of the little goldfish in the first Fantasia. There are no dinosaurs. The best thing in the whole movie is the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which they have kept from the original. And as to the finale? What can I say, the ghouls of the Night on the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Bald Mountain in the original gave me nightmares for years, while Ave Maria convinced me to go out and become a Catholic. Well, almost. That is, they had punch, impact, verve. What about Fantasia 2000? To be sure, Stravinsky’s Firebird is a wonderful piece of music, but the visual impact of the segment was not strong. And the stag that carried Mother Spring around on his antlers? Can anyone spell Bambi? A bit of originality would have been welcome.
I guess, on the whole, if you have been stood up and are feeling extremely sorry for yourself, it is not a disagreeable movie to see. But then, you might as well put on the CD of Beethoven’s Fifth in the comfort of your home and save yourself the trouble of getting lost and getting traffic tickets on your way to the IMAX experience.