Roy Disney, the nephew of Walt Disney who was a guiding force in the revival of the Disney Company’s animation fortunes in the 1980s and 90s, died on Dec. 16 at the age of 79. FJI pays tribute with a reposting of our 2000 interview with Roy Disney for the premiere of his labor of love, Fantasia 2000.

"I loved it from the first time I saw it. I always say Fantasia is my favorite film of Walt's."

Now, Roy E. Disney, vice chairman of The Walt Disney Company and nephew of the legendary entertainment and business giant, is fulfilling a lifelong dream with the release of Fantasia/2000, an essentially all-new collection of animated vignettes set to classical music, in the spirit of the groundbreaking 1940 original. And, to give the new Fantasia an extra-spectacular sendoff, it's premiering exclusively on mammoth IMAX screens for the first four months of its run.

Walt Disney had envisioned Fantasia as an ongoing series, with new segments constantly in production. But those plans quickly soured. As Roy Disney tells it, "He was not pleased with the the reception it got, for a number of reasons. First of all, it lost a fair amount of money. It got reviewed by the elite as 'How dare this uppity kid from Kansas City think he knows all about the classics.' I think that hurt Walt. The pretensions to art probably showed around the edges in a way that put people off in those days—it didn't really become the revered classic of animation in 1940 that it became later.

"Plus, the whole idea of stereophonic sound and the fact that you had to rebuild your theatre in order to run the movie (and if you didn't do that, you couldn't have the movie), in pure terms of distribution, was a disaster. I think there were only 20 some theatres that ever converted to Fantasound, and thus the original release was pretty slim. And the war was starting, and there was a new attitude toward the world in America—which hurt Bambi as well: Who cares about a little deer in the forest when our boys are over there?

"The movie made its first dollar of profit around 1957," Disney continues. "It came out about ten years later during the psychedelic era, and it was very popular to sit in the front row and smoke a joint. It was sort of on the same plane with 2001. Then it was out again around '89 or '90—that was a fairly successful release, which preceded the video release. The video just went through the roof—more than 20 million copies worldwide. That was when I took the opportunity to call Michael [Eisner] and say, 'Look, not only is there a lot of goodwill out there towards the movie, but with all this money coming in from it, we've got the money to make the new one.'"

Disney says the new Fantasia started out "with very little fanfare." He and his colleagues looked at the original, read the press coverage, and tried to get to the heart of what made the 1940 edition a classic. "I had a few preconceived notions that I carried around with me for a long time, pieces of music that I'd loved—'The Pines of Rome' probably being the first one that I brought up. We started listening to music and getting a sense of what you would do with it. We went through all the debates about whether to include modern music or The Beatles or some African or Asian music—and finally wound up back where we started, with the notion of keeping it pretty much to classical music. But we went down every alley there is, and I'd actually love to go down some of them again, with maybe a Fantasia devoted to ethnic music around the world. But that's for another date.

"Gradually, we began to assemble the first unit that did 'The Pines of Rome,' and I think after most of the departments saw it when it was finished—which is now five years ago—then the excitement began to grow."

Contrary to expectation, Disney says his animators weren't intimidated by the original's reputation. "I think there's so much pride in how good we are, that there wasn't a lot of that. I may be the one who feels it the most, because certainly my name is going to get mentioned in that connection somewhere along the line. And I've had the feeling somebody's going to write: 'How dare you! This was a classic.' The fact is, we've made virtually an entire new movie—we've kept 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice,' which was kind of the germ that started the original. It's partly hommage, and partly because it's so damn good—it's amazing how good it still looks 60 years later, the animation is just a treasure. We did have that always there in front of us as an example of how good we had to be. But we've gained a lot of confidence in the last ten years in animation, and the challenge of being that good is a welcome kind of challenge."

In Fantasia/2000, the famed Mickey Mouse showcase "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is accompanied by seven new segments. A herd of whales takes flight to Respighi's "The Pines of Rome," while pink flamingos demonstrate their yo-yo skills to Saint-Saëns' "Carnival of the Animals." New York City in the Jazz Age is depicted in the style of illustrator Al Hirschfeld, accompanied by George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," while Donald Duck gets his turn in the spotlight as Noah's assistant, rounding up the animals for the ark with Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" march. An abbreviated version of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony gets an abstract treatment, Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" is set to a Shostakovich piano concerto, and death and rebirth is the theme of the big finale featuring Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite." Veteran Disney animator Hendel Butoy is the supervising director, and James Levine conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

"All the pieces are charmingly innovative in terms of story," Disney declares, noting that the animation team tried not to become fixated on technological advances during the film's long development process. "We were really trying hard not to let the technology show through—and I think that's good advice for anybody," he asserts.



Fantasia/2000's big technological drawing card, of course, is the power of the giant IMAX screen. Roy Disney credits Motion Picture Group chairman Dick Cook with the brainstorm of launching the film in IMAX. "The question then became a technical one of could it be done, what's it going to look like," Disney recalls. "So we made some tests very quickly and ran a couple of sequences, and we were just stunned by how good it looked, uncorrected, not color-balanced prints, just off the printer. It was straight from our digital output. One of the great advantages now of the digital process is that you can blow it up to different sizes of negative and get the same very good result. We all then immediately turned around and said, 'What would we have done differently if we'd known this sooner?' Which was, of course, a futile question. But it's amazing to me how it fits that format, which is a lot squarer than the 1.85 aperture film that you're used to seeing in theatres these days—which Fantasia was designed for. We're actually projecting the full negative and leaving a little bit of black on the top and the bottom of their big screen, which you don't really notice. You see the entire negative the way it was designed, and it's huge! And all the IMAX theatres have fabulous sound systems. So it really puts you into the movie in an amazing kind of way.

"This is the first full-length film that IMAX will have ever run," Disney continues. "They've been limited by the design of their platters to around 40- to 45-minute lengths. They're redesigning all their theatres to make possible longer films now. And this is the first. There were people who said: 'Oh my God, it's so big, and if you sit there for 75 minutes your eyeballs will fall out or you'll be seasick.' And it's just not true—it's just bigger and better."

Fantasia/2000 caps a remarkable era for Roy Disney, during which he has been a key player in the artistic and financial renaissance of the company's feature animation division. During that time, the company has released such critically acclaimed landmarks as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Toy Story, Mulan, A Bug's Life and Tarzan, and achieved unprecedented box-office heights. "It's been an amazing 15 years," he agrees. "We really started from a pretty low point in 1984. And to have come this far, kind of in the same place that they were in the '40s—that's another thing that makes the timing of Fantasia so apropos. When you look back at the end of the '30s, those guys made, in a four-and-a-half-year span, Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, Fantasia and Dumbo. It just boggles the mind. And without computers, without anything but the human hand. And we're now back in a place where we can look at what we're doing in kind of the same way. Gee whiz, this year it's been Tarzan, Toy Story 2 and Fantasia in a seven-month period, which is pretty astonishing."

Disney, who first saw rough pieces of the original Fantasia when he was eight years old, remembers his famous uncle as "great fun and a great storyteller. He loved kids. He put up with me in a nice, warm uncle kind of a way. When I was a kid, I never really thought of him as anything but Uncle Walt who came over once in a while. He and my dad and their two brothers would have these vicious croquet games in our backyard.

"Then, when I got out of college, I came back here and went to work for him, and I got a whole new perspective, because he was a very tough boss who knew what he wanted—and the fact that I was his nephew was of no use whatever to me in terms of the work. My dad was afraid that he'd be extra tough on me, and I don't think he was...I know that he was tough on me, but I can't think of a time when I didn't learn something useful from it. He was very fair, but he was tough on everybody. He always expected more of you than you thought you had—whether you could give that or not and how you reacted to that was your own problem.

"He was a hands-on guy. I think that kind of drove him nuts in those last few years, when he had Disneyland and 'The Mickey Mouse Club' and the Sunday night TV show and live-action as well as animation, and they just had bought all that land in Florida. Nothing could go out without his working on it, he was always changing something."

Roy's father, Roy O. Disney, co-founded the business with Walt in 1923. "My father was every bit as smart and sharp and clever as Walt on his side of the world," his son recalls. "At the beginning, they came to an understanding that Walt was going to be the creative guy and Dad was going to be the financial guy, and they didn't cross that line. They contributed opinions across it once in a while, which could be taken or not. If Walt wanted to do something really expensive, Dad would do his best to get the money together, but all he could get was all he could get, and Walt would put up with that. It was an amazing partnership—they had some really good fights through the years, and the only reason I think they survived them all was that they were brothers."

Asked what his uncle would think of the changes in the Walt Disney empire and its ventures beyond the realm of family entertainment, Roy Disney responds, "That's the unanswerable question, of course. I always have felt that one of the problems the company faced after Walt and my dad were gone in the early '70s was trying to answer that question in their absence. The minute you start saying, 'Walt wouldn't have done that' or 'What do you think Walt would have said?' you've really created a major problem for yourself. What would he think now? I know he'd be enormously pleased with animation, I know he'd be enormously pleased with everything we've done at all the parks—he'd fix something, I'm sure. And beyond that, he was always ahead of everybody. You were always saying, 'Why didn't I think of that?' with him. So he'd probably be way ahead of all of us."

As for future incarnations of Fantasia, Disney notes, "We, of course, left the street behind us strewn with ideas that were half-finished. There's a lot of things that we would love to go back and revisit. There's also an awful lot of artists around here who would love to be able to play the game again. And then there's me—I'd love to do it again, too. But we clearly have to wait and see how we do with this one. Certainly, the response I've had from everybody so far that's seen it has been enormously positive, so more and more people are actually beginning to talk out loud about doing the next one. There's a debate about what year it would be—2007 or '8 sounds good to me."