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To lampoon Disney is a delicate affair, the prologue gets a censorious call from Hollywood as soon as Fantasia is mentioned by the presenter (Maurizio Micheli). The goal is to make audiences "see music, hear cartoons," the orchestra is comprised of sagging flappers, the conductor (Nestor Garay) is a sadistic Ollie Hardy. Visualizing the classical pieces is the meek cartoonist (Maurizio Nichetti), who's kept chained in a dungeon ("a contract of mutual trust"). Debussy for the first sketch, tracing an aged satyr turned away from the bacchanalia and offering a rueful punchline (the earth under his hooves sprouts a nipple and assumes the elusive female form) concurrent with Blier's Calmos. Bruno Bozzetto's satire serves Darwin as well as Genesis. The circularity of Ravel's "Bolero" becomes the rhythm of an evolutionary procession that begins with primordial slime bubbling at the bottom of a discarded Coke bottle and concludes with an ominous Dawn of Man. On the other hand, Stravinsky's "The Firebird" finds Adam and Eve turning down the apple and leaving the Serpent to suffer through an anti-consumerist hallucination, Zabriskie Point by way of Dumbo's "Pink Elephants on Parade." A much freer sense of line than in Fantasia, easy as watercolor one moment and fierce like Lichtenstein's the next, a couple of the lighter segments (sardonic lemmingism set to Dvorak, a bee's interrupted picnic set to Vivaldi) are unashamed doodles. Sibelius' "Valse Triste" as an ode to memory (a demolished home revived in the Keane eyes of a stray cat), odds and ends for the benefit of Svankmajer and Plympton (locked lips gorily divorced from a kissing couple). The salute to Fellini is returned in Prova d'orchestra.
--- Fernando F. Croce |