A Few Vague Plans

     My mother got Disney Plus recently, since they kept adding shows we wanted to see, and me being me, I did the obvious thing you do when you subscribe to Disney Plus; set about watching Fantasia and Fantasia 2000, two of my favorite films. 

    I love both these movies so much. I'm a huge classical music nerd, and my favorite thing to do when listening to music is to come up with stories in my head, so both these films are very much my thing. I still remember seeing Fantasia 2000 when it came out, and how awesome I thought it was. 

    That doesn't mean I think these films are perfect. They both have a problem where they choose pieces of music that are popular rather than music that short enough to fit into a movie made of shorts, so as a result they wind up cutting a lot. This isn't usually that big of a problem, since the shorts still mostly work otherwise, but it can straight up ruin some of them (namely Pastoral Symphony). There's also the fact that, for Fantasia especially, you really have to be sold on this concept for the movie to work. I don't find the lack of story in most of Fantasia's segments to be that big of a deal, as the music and visuals usually do more than enough to carry the film, but again, Pastoral symphony is the big exception to this. 

    Honestly, I have a lot to say about these films. I love the fact that when it came time to do a sequel, they chose to do it in a completely different way, which really helps it stand on it's own, but that means that the sequel has had a much harder time gaining a following. To be fair, the original didn't become immensely popular until decades after it came out, so I'm still hopeful that Fantasia 2000 will have a chance to shine at some point, because it truly deserves it. I love the fact that Fantasia is so vastly different from any of Disney's other films, which means that it's held up very well, but has had the downside of making it a tad niche. I love the fact that when they put Fantasia on DVD, they restored all of Deems Taylor's original dialogue, even if they had to get someone else to dub over it (in all honesty, whoever is dubbing is doing an excellent job), though it does have the downside of making the opening to Fantasia 2000 a little weird. 

    I've been thinking that I could probably write entire reviews of all the segments. I just love both these films, ever since I watched them on VHS when I was a kid. In general, I like the overall presentation of Fantasia a lot more than in Fantasia 2000 (although it's still excellent), but I think Fantasia 2000 did a much better job on the segments themselves.