Later versions of Fantasia (1940) are more accurate in terms of the ordering and amount of footage, which I like, but the 1990 version is perhaps the version I like best. This is what the New Beverly Cinema runs in 35mm, and I’ve been lucky to see it several times now, including this afternoon.
The negatives were manually cleaned and then photochemically copied. Without any computer processing, the 1990 version, on LD/VHS, is probably closest to what the film actually looks like, including grain, cel dust, and other beautiful flaws as a result of being made by hand under intense pressure. The 2000 version, on DVD, compares favorably, but Corey Burton replacing Deems Taylor’s voice is hard to swallow. I don’t understand why Disney, of all companies, didn’t hire a soundalike. After all, they did it for Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). The 2010 version, on BD, is de-grained, stabilized, cleaned, and de-flickered to death, in addition to being subjected to Disney’s terrible color grading. Avoid it.
The 2010 version smooths out what I consider the most thrilling part of the film: Ave Maria. In earlier versions, it flickers and shakes like crazy, giving the feeling that this whole audacious undertaking could fall apart at any frame, which, needing a fourth take and completed a day before premiering, it almost did. It’s a dreamy, breathtaking artifact of imperfection, but the ’10 de-flickered it away.
The ’90 also did the best censoring of Pastoral Symphony. Let’s face it, Disney is not going to show this uncut, so the quality of the censoring matters. The ’90 uses crops and pans. If you didn’t know it was censored, you wouldn’t know (and, indeed, I didn’t for the longest time). The ’00 crops more aggressively (it remains the largest grain I’ve ever seen), then goes further and erases Atika and Sunflower, reducing the frequency of cropping. The ’10 does more of the same, but in an unforgivable move, repeats a shot two seconds after it ran. When I watched the BD and saw this, I thought I lost my mind and had to stop the disc and check.
In one of their best series, all projected on film, LACMA (RIP) ran an incredible print of the ’00. That was nearly 25 years ago. I may still conclude that the ’90 is a better representation of Fantasia, but I would love to see this version in 35mm again.
