When I was little, there was nothing more inspiring to me than Walt Disney's Fantasia. Yes, the original Star Wars films had literally blown my mind, but there was something about Fantasia that always struck a cord. As I've grown up, Fantasia's sounds and visuals still draw that same response. It may sound silly to some, but seeing the film on Blu-ray when it came out really stunned me. I had never seen anything so beautiful created by human hands and it was like I had never seen it before. I had literally worn out my VHS copy to the point where the darkest moments of “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” “The Rite of Spring” and “Night on Bald Mountain” had become pitch black. Fantasia has not aged a day, even if it is now 73 years old.

Fantasia was released in November 1940 and had been born when production costs on a Silly Symphony short for Mickey Mouse titled “The Sorcerer's Apprentice” exploded. There was no way Disney could justify what his studio was investing in it to release it only as a short. As Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became a sudden hit in 1937, Disney began working with conductor Leopold Stokowski about a new idea that put classical music to visuals with “The Sorcerer's Apprentice” as the centerpiece.

From the moment work started on what was first known as The Concert Feature, it was clear that Fantasia was going to be something that no one had ever seen before. To this day, the animation is astounding, showing the magic of handcrafted art. Look at the hands of the Chernabog devil in “Night at Bald Mountain” or the snowflake fairies in “The Nutcracker Suite.” Even the effects animators, whose work might go unnoticed if you aren't watching too closely, are doing things that would not seem real if there were computer effects. Does the smoke coming from volcanoes in “Rite of Spring” look real to you? Of course it does, because it is real smoke.

Fantasia isn't a traditional film in any sense of the phrase, but it is still a masterpiece of the art form because it engages all our senses. If Disney could have found a way to make us smell, he would have. Each segment of the film feels like a brief masterpiece (although I'll admit “The Pastoral Symphony” does get a little hard to sit through). But even then, Disney and Stokowski were thinking cinematically by arranging the segments in perfect order. You start off slow with Bach's “Toccata and Fugue,” reach a climax with Stravinski's “Rite of Spring,” ease you back down for the hilarity of “The Dance of the Hours,” before we reach a dark moment with “Bald Mountain.” You always want to leave an audience with a positive note, so we go out with Schubert's “Ave Maria.”

Disney had hoped that Fantasia would be a living, breathing product – something the studio definitely wants to make sure you never forget while going through the bonus materials – but then something called World War II happened. The war derailed the film's overseas success and it made it impossible to justify another crack at tying animation to music. After several false starts over the decades, a new version finally started getting together during the height of the Disney Renaissance of the '90s. It took a full decade, but in 1999, Fantasia 2000 debuted in theaters and even had an IMAX run.

Fantasia 2000 suffers from one huge problem. No, it's not the cutesy introductions between the segments (Disney had the intelligence to pick established stars like James Earl Jones and Steve Martin to do those). It's the running time. While Fantasia lasted a full two hours, for some reason Fantasia 2000 was cut to just 75 minutes. This means that Beethoven's “Fifth Symphony” and “The Carnival of the Animals” are only the most famous parts and Stravinski's “Firebird” is 10 minutes.

Still, what makes Fantasia 2000 a worthy successor is the devotion to cutting-edge animation techniques. The “Firebird” sequence rivals the best of Disney's Golden Age and “Rhapsody In Blue” achieves the impossible task of animating Al Hirshfeld's style. “The Carnival of the Animals” is a moving painting that could have been a Silly Symphony. It is worth noting that much of the CGI work in “Pines of Rome” and “Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Major-I. Allegro” hasn't aged well.

While it's entirely possible that I've become too much invested in my belief that Fantasia is among the finest films ever crafted that I've lost an ability to look at it critically, it is impossible to deny that its technical achievements are still marvelous. Fantasia 2000 did the impossible by trying to live up to Fantasia and in some places it did. Fantasia can still breathe as Disney envisioned, but because audiences are still in awe of the magic in the original film.

On Home Video: Disney is obsessed with only having films in print for two years at the most. So, the magnificent Blu-ray two-pack of the films for 2010 is already out of print. It is a magnificent set and if you can get a hold of it, I would. Another alternative though is the great 2001 Fantasia Legacy DVD box. While the features in the DVD set are included on the Fantasia 2000 Blu-ray, you could only access them through a “Virtual Vault” which no longer exists! Hopefully, Disney brings it back in print (with those bonus materials accessible) soon, especially with a video game in the works.

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image: Amazon