Walt Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Don Ferguson

Stokowski himself suggested to Walt that they create an entirely new personality to play the apprentice, a suggestion Walt promptly ignored. There was some early talk of featuring Dopey in the starring role, but Walt was not interested in using any characters from Snow White. Mickey, however, was not everyone’s first choice to play the apprentice. No dialogue, no subtitles, just the apprentice and his co-stars moving to the Dukas score. I said I liked it very much and would be happy to cooperate with him.”Īpprentice was originally planned as its own short film. “I was alone having dinner at a table near him and he called across to me, ‘Why don’t we sit together?’ Then he began to tell me he was interested in Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice as a possible short, and did I like the music. “I first met Walt Disney in a restaurant,” Stokowski outlined in a letter he wrote in 1967. That changed in 1938 after a chance encounter Walt had with the great conductor Leopold Stokowski (a fixture in Hollywood at the time, providing his services on a variety of films).

The Disney story team began planning Apprentice around the recordings of acclaimed Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. When the apprentice falls asleep, however, he awakens to find himself in a bit of a predicament. Its story revolves around an apprentice of a great sorcerer who has grown tired from repetitive manual labor, and decides to automate his chores with a little help from his departed master’s hat. He chose The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, an 1897 concert piece by French composer Paul Dukas, which was based on a 1797 poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which itself was based on a 2nd century tale by the Greek satirist Lucian. “Music has always played a very important part since sound came to the cartoon,” Walt said. He had already enjoyed success with his music-driven Silly Symphonies series. In 1937, several months before the premiere of Snow White, Walt expressed a desire to set animation to classical music. The other, a series of animated sequences set to classical music, was known early on as The Concert Feature. One of the first two animated features completed there was Bambi. the first being 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice':Īfter the phenomenal success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney utilized its earnings to construct a new, state-of-the-art studio on Buena Vista Street in Burbank, California. As Fantasia is a feature film made up of eight animated segments, we're dedicating separate posts throughout the month for each part.

Walt Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Don Ferguson