As the Walt Disney Company has made some head-scratching decisions with its movies over the years, I’ve often wondered when the company first started to deal with various responses to its films.
The company’s movie reviews confirm that negative reviews are not just a recent occurrence.
The release of the Disney film “Fantasia” on Nov. 13, 1940, was the beginning of the company’s journey in navigating the waters of various public reactions.
The expectations for Fantasia were high
With the company still in its infancy, Walt Disney himself was looking to show the range of his company’s capability in the entertainment industry.
“We’ve got more in this medium than making people laugh,” Disney reportedly told his staff while further elaborating that “Fantasia” would “change the history of motion pictures.”
The debut of the film sought to show the animation and musical genius of the company by using a “first-of-its-kind, surround-sound system he called Fantasound, to be installed in first-run theaters.”
But as the film rolled out, the reviews were mixed among the general public.
The New York Times’ movie critic reportedly thought the motion picture was “simply terrific — as terrific as anything that has ever happened on a screen.”
The Smithsonian reported that the art critic Robert Hughes wrote about the film in 1973 that “when, in Fantasia, Mickey Mouse clambered up on the (real) podium and shook hands with the (real) conductor Leopold Stokowski,” he thought that “high art and low art collapsed into one another.”
Fantasia proved to be too ‘out there and different’ for some
Britannica reported that the film ended up becoming “one of Disney’s more controversial works, derided for its portentousness and praised for its stunning visual virtuosity.”
A 1941 review of the film reported that “where Disney is self-consciously creative he is liable to more portentous errors of taste.”
Though this shares a glimpse of what critics thought of the film after its initial release, movie critics today still have things to say about one of Disney’s first movies.
In a more recent review of the film on Rotten Tomatoes, Carson Timar from ButteredPopcorn wrote, “Fantasia ends up as a film easier to respect than truly enjoy. While the individual elements are rather fantastic, the final feature as a whole is simply ineffective when it comes to showcasing the talents involved.”