'Fantasia' Around The World

GIUSEPPE PENNISI visits the big screen in Rome

Do you remember Walt Disney's Fantasia? A 'concert movie', then a new concept, premiered on 13 November 1940, in only thirteen cinemas especially equipped with Fantasound — special machinery to give the audience the illusion that the music was not recorded but live as in a concert hall. Leopold Stokowski conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra to accompany ten animated episodes with well-known pieces of classical concert music. Making Fantasia cost the Disney factory three years of hard labor by some three thousands designers, animators, technicians and no less than ten movie directors...