Textual Analysis Of The Movie Fantasia

The program starts with Deems Taylor breaking down the types of visuals the audience will see in Fantasia. He describes three different types of music, absolute music, program music, and definite story music. The first segment, featuring absolute music, shows the audience that music is not made up of any one component. Taylor tells the audience that it could envision anything it wanted to go along with the music, but that the images on the screen are what the Disney artists have envisioned themselves. In stating this, Taylor tells his audience that the music is subjective with no wrong or right way to perceive it. While the Disney artists may have envisioned these particular colors and shapes to go along with Toccata and Fugue, different Disney
However, none of these segments use speech, a crucial characteristic in most structuralism topics. The film lets music and vision speak for itself while incorporating familiar folktales into the production. Throughout the film the audience experiences tales of Hell, Mount Olympus, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and evolution, all familiar concepts in Western culture. Through the use of familiarity, Disney is able to accentuate the non-uniformity that exists in even the most universal of stories. For instance, Mount Olympus is not thought of the same way from person to person. Although stories of Mount Olympus have existed for thousands of years, there is no one way to imagine it. Although there is a basic structure or way in which the tales of Mount Olympus are thought of, that is not true proof of structuralism. There is a component of deep structure that is characteristic to structuralism. While this tale has a semi-varied structure, the deep structure is not identical in each individual’s thought process. While watching the Mount Olympus film segment an audience member, may feel that the way in which they imagined the mystical place is very different from what they see on screen. In this way, Fantasia has shown that post structuralism is a concept that holds more true than structuralism. Unknowingly, the creators of Fantasia have shown how in different time periods, there are different interpretations of the film itself. For instance, in the Mount Olympus segment there is a very uncomfortable, bigoted few seconds where the viewers see two centaurettes who have zebra bottom halves and black women upper halves. This indicates difference between the white women/ Westerns horse hybrids and the black women/ African zebra hybrids. In 1940, this may not have been seen as a big deal, but today is wildly condemned as racist and has been edited out of more recent cuts of