'Fantasia'

I wish I knew who Walt Disney really was. It's kind of a joke nowadays to paint the guy as something entirely different from his company's product: A racist, an anti-semite, a guy with questionable Christian ethics and someone that would rat out his own people in the business during the Communist witchhunt of the 1950s.

I tend to think the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. Maybe he wasn't the sweetest man in the world, but he was by far nowhere near the worst.

However, in 1941, during the Academy Awards, he called Fantasia (having been released in 1940), Disney's third full-length animated feature, a "mistake."

Probably because it failed at the box office. In hindsight, he'd probably change his mind. Still, it makes me think that Disney was into making money more so than anything else. If he truly believed in the accomplishment of Fantasia, then he'd be able to seperate the commercial success with success as an artist.

With no doubt is Fantasia an unadulterated success, a masterpiece of modern storytelling, animation and the fusion of film and music.

It was a box-office failure (as were many of Disney's early ventures) because it's more than two hours long, includes a ton of talking from a music critic explaining the ins and outs of some classical pieces and, finally, it is a lot of classical music. You won't entertain adults (more or less children) with two hours of boring talking and classical music.

Still, it doesn't mean it's not important. It was released at a time when animation was all done by hand. Again, the intro piece alone probably took countless hours, tedious work of thousands of animators and employees to almost do something much harder than seven dwarfs: Animate music. Give the sounds a shape, color and form.

There's a lot of detail and color that make Fantasia special and the amount of effort (and faith) that went into making it along makes it worthwhile.

It's one thing to think Disney as a racist or bad person. But what disappoints me the most (because a lot of people in 1940 were bad people) is that he didn't always put as much faith and love into his work as much as his work made him a legend.