Fantasia 2000: Critic Reviews

Sixty years after Walt Disney's animators first set cartoons to classical music, they've conjured up seven new sequences for Fantasia 2000. Judging from the often Mickey Mouse results, they may have been too hasty.

Ideally the music and imagery should fuse into something larger than either. It has rarely worked out that way.

Doesn't play like a celebration. In its sentimental yearning for a golden age when another one's upon us, it feels a little like a rebuke.

Compared to how visually and narratively imaginative Disney-released animated films have been in the 1990s, this one seems at a loss for purpose.

The rest of these animated sequences depend on gimmickry, cuteness, or facile ideology.

Those who get to know the spectacular IMAX format with this movie are in for a jumbo treat.

Seems to have been made by people with nothing in particular to prove.

As with the original Fantasia, the new film is a mixture of artistically respectable and mediocre moments, which for overall ambition and range, has no parallel in the world of contemporary animation.

It's not that the images aren't pretty, or that great care hasn't gone into them -- it's that the sensibility behind them is so icky, limited in its conception of beauty to picture postcards and the sort of paintings you see in chain hotels.

Fantasia 2000 does not soar the way its predecessor did, but neither does it plummet to the earth.

It provides some fine artists the chance to stretch and frolic, even as it reminds today's audiences of animation's limitless borders.

could be just the thing to help educate a young person about classical music

Although magnificent and filled with imagination, Fantasia 2000 doesn't hold up as being particularly ground-breaking or innovative.

Delightful, but may scare more sensitive kids.

A worthy successor to the original concept, allowing the next generation of animation talent to cut loose. [Blu-ray]

A lightweight affair... Despite some momentary flashes of brilliance, this is no successor to the great Fantasia.

Fantasia/2000 will no doubt become a Disney perennial, but that does not by definition make it a classic.

Like its predecessor, Fantasia 2000 offers a plotless string of beautifully animated vignettes set to music; unlike its predecessor, it's a good deal shorter and far less tedious for it.

This new installment perhaps aims slightly lower than the original.

This new Fantasia corrects some of the flaws of the old movie, but generates some new flaws of its own.

This must be the most belated sequel the movies have produced.

The IMAX presentation of this millennial sequel is a welcome addition to the family, though it seems to lack the heart of the original.

A roller-coaster ride of energy, utilizing incredible animated imagery, elegant classical music and state-of-the-art technology.

My only complaint is that it was over too soon.

It is a reminder that, after all these years, memories of the first Fantasia can still conjure magic in the mind.