I love Lileks' Halloween-themed bleat this week (especially the link titles at the bottom).

And his review of a classic Disney animation film. He manages to wring new insights from it (though I have to confess, I've always liked "The Rites of Spring."

Walt Disney was a genius. He figured out how to make people fall asleep to the strains of Stravinsky :-)

Methinks he doth protest too much!!

I get the impression that Lileks judges movies by how they stack up against Felini or some other pointy headed director.

Fantasia was an EXPERIMENT!! Instead of busting poor dead Walts marbles, break out some books and read why and how they made that flick. People at the time were NOT as well informed as we are now. They saw Disney on the marquee and ASSUMED Mickey and Donald.

Maybe they had it better back when Fantasia was released, than we do now. Just once I'd like to see a movie where I haven't seen 400 trailers on TV, 900 trailers in the theater, trailers that start a year BEFORE it comes out. I'd like to go back to a time when we did not see the principal actors pumping it for 2 months before it opens, appearing on every show except reruns of the Ninja Turtles.

Face it Bill Murray and Robin Williams aren't always in funny movies, DeNiro is hilarious when he wants to be, Walt was making art, not Mickey and Donald, when he made Fantasia.

Fantasia failed more from word of mouth from people who did not see Mickey and Donald as from any failing of Walts. Remember, also, that we are discusing this film over 60 years after it was released. If art is supposed to spur discussion, dissent, thought, argument, etc. then Disney's Fantasia fits the description.

...oh, and Lileks, kiss my jack-o-lantern for talking down Walts masterpeice!!!

Steve, I think you misread Lileks. I've been reading him for about three years and seen him "take down" other works. This was not a take-down, but a nostalgically critical look back at American pop culture, one of his trademarks.

Reread the last several paragraphs, where he traces his reaction to the movie over time: "When I first saw it at the age of 14, I was stunned. When I saw it again ten years later, I thought: kitsch. When I saw it ten years after that, I thought: how interesting that they could just assume the Christianity of the audience. And now I think all those things."

His reaction to the movie is the same as to classic jazz age architecture: "Magnificent, utterly American - and for all the machinery involved, it all comes down to the movement of the human hand. The hand behind the mouse creates something different than the hand behind the pen. Better and worse and worse and better."

I also liked that he did the Googling to figure out that the man who drew the Demon Chernobog in Fantasia also created the "Sugar Bear" for Sugar Crisp cereal.

It's "Night on Bald Mountain", (Mussorgsky)