WMS

Fantasia 2000

2000 · Directed by James Algar

🧘4

Woke Score

59

Critic

🍿72

Audience

Ultra Based

Critics rated this 55 points above its woke score. Among Ultra Based films, this critic score ranks #937 of 1469.

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Synopsis

Blending lively music and brilliant animation, this sequel to the original 'Fantasia' restores 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' and adds seven new shorts.

Consciousness Assessment

Fantasia 2000 is, in the most literal sense, a film about nothing. It consists of abstract animated segments set to classical music, narrated by celebrities who appear only to introduce each piece before vanishing into the ether. There is no plot, no characters, no conflict, and most crucially, no opportunity for social consciousness of any variety to manifest itself. The film exists in a pure aesthetic space where cultural commentary simply cannot gain purchase.

The segments range from the whimsical (Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue rendered as New York street scenes) to the cosmic (Bach's Toccata and Fugue in a wordless, geometric abstraction). One watches these vignettes with the same detachment one might bring to a museum visit. They are beautiful or interesting or tedious depending on one's tolerance for abstract animation, but they are unconcerned with the social categories by which we have learned to measure cultural products.

The minimal score reflects only the faintest whisper of representation in the celebrity narrators themselves, who include figures from different professional backgrounds and, in the case of Quincy Jones and James Earl Jones, Black cultural figures. But this is mere happenstance in a film that has no ideology to speak of. Fantasia 2000 remains what it has always been: a technical exercise in animation, divorced from the messy business of human society entirely.

Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm

Critic Reviews

59%from 27 reviews
Miami Herald100

It's so rare to be swept away by a presentation of this magnitude. By all means, go.

Howard CohenRead Full Review →
TNT RoughCut90

Walt would be proud.

Christopher BrandonRead Full Review →
New York Post88

More than lives up to its clever positioning as the first movie of the new millennium.

Lou LumenickRead Full Review →
Salon30

There's some sort of gross egotism involved in linking great music to visuals that are so unabashedly kitschy.

Charles TaylorRead Full Review →

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