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By Michael - February 8th, 2011 
“Maybe we ought to open up on those things instead of playing down to our medium or our public. That’s the very thing we like to have, a challenge.”
– Walt Disney
This single quote speaks volumes to explain the devout admiration and fascination so many hold for the works of Walt Disney. It also explains my great love of Fantasia, his studio’s 1940 masterpiece. My interest stems not only from the film itself, but from the underlying concept of the entire project; Fantasia was not meant to be a film unto itself, but rather a constantly renewing experiment in animation and music that would blur the lines between art forms and between what was considered “high” and “low” art. To prepare for this, the Disney studio was planning a stream of exciting new animation to be added to the Fantasia repertoire.
Continue reading Future Fantasias, 1940
By Michael - June 10th, 2010 Trayas, from Nightingale, by Mike Gabriel
I recently mentioned the unmade film Ramayana, once rumored to be in the works at the Disney animation studio. I’ve yet to see any artwork for this project; instead, a lot of fan sites on the internet mistake concept art for another project as being from Ramayana. This [...]
By Michael - January 21st, 2010 Concept art for The Velveteen Rabbit by Fred Warter
The last decade, filled as it was with corporate turmoil at the Walt Disney Company, has proved a veritable elephant’s graveyard of abandoned ideas and projects at Walt Disney Animation. First there were the long-in-gestation projects that were scuttled with the purge of traditional [...]
By Michael - April 16th, 2008 Although unconfirmed, it’s widely believed that Pixar director Andrew Stanton’s next film after WALL-E will be John Carter of Mars. The science-fiction film, based on the series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, has been alternately rumored to be animated, live-action or a hybrid of both. Yet it is not Hollywood’s first attempt to [...]
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Four Decades of Magic
Essays about the first forty years of Walt Disney World, including two pieces by yours truly. Available in print and for Kindle. |
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