Above this chord all the string and woodwind instruments play a rapid rushing-down passage, beginning very high and ending with the lowest tones of the double basses. As the conductor explained, the sound we hear is:Īn extremely powerful ayed by all the horns, trumpets, trombones, tuba - with deep foundation tones by tympani, bass drum, and tamtam. To soundtrack that moment, Stokowski used the recording studio to achieve a musical effect that would have been impossible in live performance. As with the Dance of the Hours segment, live models - including Tytla's wife - were used to ensure fidelity to the human form, in this case for the anthropomorphic dancing flames.Īt the final moment of Chernobog's great revel, the devil casts his minions down like a lighting bolt into hell. To show the spirits rising from their graves, for example, drawings were reflected off undulating tin, then overlaid on backgrounds. To achieve the otherworldly effects of the demonic Bald Mountain summit, Disney's animators again reached into their bottomless bag of tricks. Though he's animated, this devil is no cartoon - and Disney's vision of hell is no caricature, but a Boschian menagerie of the grotesque. If the mythological creatures in the film's Pastoral segment were somewhat sanitized, there was nothing safe about the horrific minions of Chernobog. The segment was meant to startle, and it certainly does. He was a hallmark creation of the animator Vladimir Tytla, a master at rendering the human form - here, as it emerges from the top of a mountain, with wicked horns and bat-like wings. The Mussorgsky segment, inspired by a Slavonic legend about evil spirits gathering on Walpurgis Night, has become a scary Halloween standby through its inclusion in Disney anthologies, and the towering demon never fails to frighten. In the end, though, all the work paid off: the shot is a transcendent conclusion to a landmark film.īefore viewers could ascend to heaven with Schubert, though, they had to descend into hell with the demon Chernobog, the malevolent star of the segment set to Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain. First the crew used the wrong lens, then there was an earthquake - and they kept having to stop work so that the boss could use the soundstage for his badminton games.
#Fantasia when i see you song meaning full
It was one of the most ambitious shots in animation history - it was the longest single shot ever animated up to that date - and completing the shot, which involved moving a multi-plane camera through a cavernous soundstage full of illustrated panels, became a comedy of errors. The final footage - the epic last shot of the concluding Ave Maria segment - had only arrived in New York four hours prior to the screening.
What most of the audience didn't realize was just how close they came to not seeing the complete movie.