Fantasia (film)

Fantasia is a 1940 motion picture, produced by Walt Disney and first released on November 13, 1940 in the United States. The third film in the Disney animated features canon, it is an experiment in animation and music. The soundtrack of the film consists of eight pieces of classical music, seven of which were recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski (a Los Angeles studio orchestra performed the music for the Sorcerer's Apprentice segment). Animated artwork of varying degrees of abstraction or literalism is used to illustrate or accompany the concert in various ways. The film also includes live-action segments featuring Stokowski, the orchestra, and American composer and music critic Deems Taylor, who serves as the host for the film. Besides its avant-garde qualities, Fantasia was notable for being the first major film released in stereophonic sound, using a process dubbed "Fantasound".

Fantasia was originally released by Walt Disney Productions itself without then-distributor RKO Radio Pictures, and exhibited as a two-hour roadshow film with booked engagements. The film opened to mixed critical reaction and failed to generate a large commercial audience, which left Walt Disney in financial straits. Fantasia was eventually picked up by RKO for release in 1941 and edited drastically to a running time of 81 minutes in 1942. The film eventually turned a profit following several re-releases, most notably a 1969 reissue. The re-releases of Fantasia restored various amounts of the deleted footage, with the most common version being the 1946 re-release edit, which ran nine minutes shorter than the original 124 minute roadshow version.

A 1982 reissue featured a newly recorded digital soundtrack conducted by composer Irwin Kostal, but was taken out of circulation in 1990 after a restored version of the original Stokowski-conducted soundtrack was prepared. The original version of Fantasia was never released again after 1941, and although some of the original audio elements no longer exist, a 2000 DVD release version attempted to restore as much of the original version of the film as possible.

Despite the film's initial failure, its reputation has grown to be considered one of the greatest films of all time. For instance, Fantasia and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) are the only animated films and the only Disney films to be listed on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films of all time. The film was also deemed "culturally and historically" significant by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.