Disney’s concert film is as uneven as its eight pieces: the mouse, the hippos and the devil on the mountain are as good as anything the studio drew, and the Beethoven is a chocolate box. See it for the good three quarters.
Walt Disney, producing, takes eight pieces of concert music, hands them to Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and asks a dozen credited directors to draw whatever the music puts in their heads. Deems Taylor introduces each piece from a lectern, like a man who suspects we have not been to many concerts. There is no story, and it runs 124 minutes with an interval. It is the most ambitious thing the studio had made and the least even, and about three quarters of it is as good as animation has been.
James Wong Howe photographs the orchestra as shadows against washes of blue, red and gold, the players lit from behind so that we see bows and bells and bald heads. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, which opens the programme, carries on from there: the bows become streaks of light, the streaks become shapes, and for ten minutes there is nothing on screen you could put a name to. Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite brings things back. Fairies hang dew on a spider’s web, thistles and orchids dance a Cossack number, and a ring of mushrooms shuffles round with one small one always a half-beat late and hurrying to catch up. That small mushroom is the whole studio in a single drawing.
Mickey Mouse, voiced by Walt Disney, borrows the sorcerer’s hat, sets a broom to carrying water and falls asleep while the cellar fills. Paul Dukas’s music might have been written for it: every splash lands on a beat, and the brooms multiply in step with the strings. Joe Grant and Dick Huemer’s story keeps it to one room and one bad idea. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring follows and is the film at its most solemn, a planet cooling, volcanoes, dinosaurs in the rain, then drought and dust. It is long and grand, and the Tyrannosaurus arriving in a storm is frightening. We would not cut a second of that fight and we would cut most of the lava.
After the interval comes the stretch the film’s detractors mean. Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is set on a pastel Olympus with centaurs, cherubs, a drunk Bacchus on a donkey and a storm. The colours are sugared almonds. The animators, who a reel earlier made a mushroom funny by timing alone, are given nothing to time; the centaurs pose and flirt and the music goes on without them. We sat through it faintly embarrassed, as if a relative had started singing at the table. It is the longest twenty minutes in the film.
Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours is a proper comic ballet, with ostriches, elephants, alligators and a hippo in a tutu who is lighter on her feet than anyone in the Beethoven. Then Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, in which the peak of a mountain unfolds into a pair of wings and a devil the size of the mountain calls the dead up from the churchyard below, pours them into his palm and turns them into fire. We were frightened, by a U certificate from 1940, because the drawing has weight: he moves like something heavy and the flames move like flames. Schubert’s Ave Maria, sung by Julietta Novis, closes the evening as a slow line of lights through a forest, the film apologising for having scared us. It is lovely and a little dull.
Stephen Csillag’s editing keeps the orchestral interludes short, so they rest the eye rather than test it, and there is a good joke at the interval in which a nervous line on the soundtrack is asked to play the harp and the bassoon. Twelve directors are credited, James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ben Sharpsteen and Wilfred Jackson among them, and the film looks like twelve films.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Pinocchio (1940) each told one story. This tells eight, one of them badly. Most critics land near where we do; the ones who call the whole thing kitsch have been looking at the centaurs and not at the mountain. Watch it with a child if one is available, make the tea during the Beethoven, and be back in your seat before the devil wakes.
