Initially released to IMAX theaters at the crescendo of millennial fever and 60 years after the original Fantasia, Fantasia 2000 was meant to revitalize Walt Disney's goal of a constantly evolving film, with new segments replacing old ones with each re-release. Only The Sorcerer's Apprentice remains, with seven new shorts. Angular, abstracted butterfly-like shapes fly through the air in Beethoven's Symphony No. 5; computer-animated whales take flight in Respighi's Pines of Rome; Al Hirschfeld's
caricatures of New York life come alive in George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue; Hans Christian Andersen's The Steadfast Tin Soldier is retold with computer animation against Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2, Allegro, Opus 102; frantic flamingos try to stop their yo-yoing comrade in Camille Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals, Finale; Donald and Daisy Duck play Noah and his wife trying to manage the ark to Sir Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance; and the cycle of life, death, and rebirth are celebrated in Stravinsky's Firebird Suite. ~ Emru Townsend, Rovi
As with the original Fantasia, the new film is a mixture of artistically respectable and mediocre moments, which for overall ambition and range, has no parallel in the world of contemporary animation.
It's not that the images aren't pretty, or that great care hasn't gone into them -- it's that the sensibility behind them is so icky, limited in its conception of beauty to picture postcards and the sort of paintings you see in chain hotels.
Whatever its flaws -- from kitschy cupids to racist centaurs -- at least the first Fantasia had a human touch. The sequel seems cold and mechanical by comparison.
Sixty years after Walt Disney's animators first set cartoons to classical music, they've conjured up seven new sequences for Fantasia 2000. Judging from the often Mickey Mouse results, they may have been too hasty.
Like its predecessor, Fantasia 2000 offers a plotless string of beautifully animated vignettes set to music; unlike its predecessor, it's a good deal shorter and far less tedious for it.
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