Review – Fantasia 2000

After all these years, the Disney Corporation has succumbed to two temptations: the urge to redo the original Fantasia with different music and stories, and pressure from the viewing public to include more cartoony stuff and less abstract, conceptual material. The result is something middle-of-the-road, not quite mediocre but certainly neither as good nor as bad as the original. The film-makers wisely elected to do away with dull, inadequate passages such as the “Ave Maria” finale from the first one. On the other hand, the Beethoven sequence – at least to my taste – falls considerably short of what Oscar Fischinger did with Bach in Fantasia, and there’s nothing here as dramatic as the Bela Lugosi-inspired “Night on Bald Mountain.” And yes, the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is in both versions. I guess the kids will probably like this effort a bit better, but I’m still a bit more attached to the first one. Mildly amusing