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Thatkeeps the coachman s personality the same, he said in a December 8, 1938,Pinocchio meeting.23 But by then such considerations were shrinking rapidlyin importance.While Disney was struggling with Pinocchio and to a lesser extent withBambi, plans for another feature were taking shape in his mind.The newfeature was the outgrowth of his decision in 1937 to make a musically moreambitious short than any he had made before a sort of super Silly Sym-phony based on Paul Dukas s symphonic poem The Sorcerer s Apprentice, withMickey Mouse in the title role.Dukas s music told a story, one that had itself originated in anothermedium; Disney s greatest challenge was thus to come up with images thatwere more than superfluous.That challenge must have seemed manageablefor a cartoon studio that had already provided a striking visual complementto Rossini s William Tell overture in The Band Concert, a Mickey Mouse car-toon released almost three years earlier.ambi ti on s pri ce, 1 93 8 1 941 1 41 Soon after he bought the rights to the Dukas music in July 1937, Disneyran into Leopold Stokowski, the former conductor of the Philadelphia Or-chestra and a Hollywood celebrity in his own right, at a Los Angeles restau-rant. I was alone having dinner at a table near him and he called across to me why don t we sit together, Stokowski wrote to Richard Hubler in 1967. Thenhe began to tell me how he was interested in Dukas Sorcerer s Apprentice asa possible short, and did I like the music.I said I liked it very much and wouldbe happy to co-operate with him. 24 Disney may have been slow to followup, but in October, Gregory Dickson, one of Disney s New York representa-tives, reported that he had run into Stokowski on the train to New York andhad found him not only serious about working on The Sorcerer s Apprenticebut also a very charming person and not at all the prima donna that variouspublicity stories have made him out to be. 25 Dickson s letter set Disney onfire: I am greatly enthused over the idea and believe that the union ofStokowski and his music, together with the best of our medium, would be themeans of a great success and should lead to a new style of motion picture pre-sentation.Through this combined medium, we could do things that wouldbe impossible through any other form of motion picture now available. 26Stokowski conducted the music for the sound track with a Hollywood or-chestra on January 10, 1938.The recording, at the David O.Selznick studio,began at midnight and ended a little over three hours later.Bill Garity wasnot impressed by Stokowski s performance: My positive conclusion is thatall we are getting for this very expensive work is Stokowski s name on themain title and that the musical results which may be spectacular and satis-factory to the average audience do not even approximate the perfection whichwe had expected would result from this eªort and expense. 27As it turned out, Walt Disney did not share Garity s skepticism quitethe opposite.Work on the animated version of The Sorcerer s Apprentice pro-ceeded slowly and expensively during 1938.It was not substantially completeuntil November 4, 1938, when a rough preview was held for studio em-ployees.28 By the time that preview was held, sketches for a whole featuremade up of animation set to classical music were beginning to appear on sto-ryboards.Over the course of 1938, Disney s ambitions had grown.He spokeearly in that year of making a series of short cartoons based on classical pieces,but by the end of the summer he was planning a whole concert feature inwhich Stokowski would be heavily involved.Disney s Apprentice wouldnot be released as a special short, but as a small part of the concert feature.Disney had made few cartoons at all comparable to what he had in mindnow.In 1937, though, shortly before the release of Snow White and the Seven1 42 a drawi ng factory Dwarfs, he made a short called The Old Mill.Essentially plotless, it simplyshowed a storm s eªects on an old windmill and the small animals and birdsthat lived in it.The Old Mill was the first Disney cartoon to be filmed in partwith a multiplane camera, but Disney did not conceive of the film as a testof the camera.It was instead, its director Wilfred Jackson said, to be a car-toon that depended more on the pictorial aspects of it than on characteri-zation of personalities.I was made to feel that there was more involvedthan just trying to see if a camera would work. 29Now the whole concert feature or Fantasia, as it was being called by thefall of 1938 would depend on the pictorial aspects. In September meet-ings on the new film, Disney was clearly much more excited by Fantasia s vi-sual possibilities than he was by Pinocchio s nagging problems.He even fore-saw the pictorial aspects being expanded to embrace manipulation of thesound track. We can make a truck shot of that mountain and come rightback, he said on September 14, 1938, talking about a closing sequence whosemusic would be Schubert s Ave Maria. At the same time the whole cho-rus comes right down the sides of the theater, seeming to enter a church justahead of the camera.30Disney relished the task of populating the miniature world of fairies, flow-ers, insects, and tiny animals that he envisioned for Tchaikovsky s NutcrackerSuite, at one point demonstrating how a Chinese turtle should dance by mov-ing in a stiª-jointed way and jerking his head back and forth in what a ste-nographer described as a wooden tempo. 31 He was even enthusiastic aboutStravinsky s Rite of Spring, premiered barely twenty years before and still verymuch modern music. But the violent music which probably would haverepelled him had he heard it for the first time in a concert hall sounded al-together diªerent when he was reading a continuity that envisioned it as theaccompaniment to a screen full of animated volcanoes. This fits right to atee, doesn t it? he said in an October 19, 1938, meeting. Stravinsky will say: Jesus! I didn t know I wrote that music! 32While Disney was enjoying a sort of busman s holiday on Fantasia, Pinoc-chio suªered.His words about Pinocchio had a curiously distracted sound
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