The Animated Film That Looked Back at Fantasia and Laughed
In 1940, Walt Disney released Fantasia , a cathedral-sized attempt to marry classical music with animation and drag cartoons into the marble halls of high culture. Thirty-six years later, Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto answered with a wrecking ball. Allegro non troppo begins with a producer boasting that he has invented an immortal new form: animated stories synchronized to classical music. He is then informed that an American named “Prisney” may have already done something similar. Undeterred, he assembles an orchestra of elderly women, an authoritarian conductor and an exhausted animator kept chained in a dungeon. That opening tells us exactly what kind of film this is. It admires Fantasia , steals its structure and then attacks nearly everything surrounding it: artistic pretension, commercial exploitation, obedience, masculinity, consumerism and the assumption that technological progress represents moral progress. The live-action passages are filmed like frantic, decayin...