Back to ramblings
Yesterday, I went to see Fantasia 2000. Well, who wouldn't? I had a chance to see how Disney had butchered one of the most magical, yet hardest to sit through movies that they had ever made (
Fantasia was much better in the advent of the video tape. You could watch the movie in segments. I have a pretty decent attention span but I've never enjoyed a full run of
Fantasia without a significant break, and I've watched it with friends more than a few times. I really recommend the film about five in the morning, with a bunch of people who are similarly stressed out from exams, low on sleep, whom you have never seen before in your life.). I was blown away, surprised that the magic was still there, found myself getting scene ideas for writing left and right, and generally having a great time. Oh, and Steve Martin must die. Nothing personal, Steve, you just can't ever live down the shame of that host segment.
However, I don't feel like waxing poetic on this film, no matter how good it was. What I'd like to talk about is a little phenomenon that took place afterwards. I was standing around outside the theatre, waiting for the friend with whom I'd gone to see the film, and I noticed that people were... gasp... trading smiles with each other. I was the victim of several of these shared moments. We'd all experienced an eighty-six minute joyride of the senses, found ourselves thrust into a very intense experience and once we came out the other side, we
knew that the only people who could appreciate it were others who'd shared the same experience. For a moment, we were almost joined by a common bond of Mickey and Donald Duck, and gosh-darn it, this actually felt good.
And then you look beyond this, at Diz-Nee's other Empires across the globe, and you start to wonder -- if that was the magic, what's this? Is this like that
Twilight Zone episode where a man got three wishes, but the genie who granted them warned that each one carried with it consequences? To get something magical like this, did we have to wade through the Disney animated film machine turning into utter tripe for a decade, the amusement parks changing into the Most Expensive Commercial Enterprise on Earth and Disney Animator going down with the ship when the Amiga tanked (I'm
BITTER, damn it!)?
Apparently so. I'm not saying anything you've never heard before, am I? (Except for the animator software. No one's heard of that *sigh*) What I hope that I am saying is that there's still a little spark of magic coming out of Disney, and it only took an eight-story IMAX theatre to deliver it.