by Jake Bourgeois, Contributing Writer
I’ve always had a soft spot for animation. More years than not, at least a couple of animated features find their way onto my top 10 list. So, I’m setting out to shine a light on some films that may have passed you by. The idea here is to take a look at some underseen gems — so no Toy Story or Frozen here.
Let’s get started.
With Luca hitting Disney+, I wanted to try to take some inspiration from the Italian setting and see if I could find myself an Italian animated film. Having covered The Breadwinnerand Oliver & Company, films that were certainly underseen but still had a bit of an audience, I wanted to try to find something truly off the beaten path for this month.
I may have overcorrected slightly.
If you go searching for Italian animated films, after sorting through films that just happen to take place in Italy, you’ll come across this: Allegro non troppo (1976), which translated is roughly, “fast, but not overly so.” This seemed to fit the bill. While having a small viewership, it seemed to be well-received. It even won a couple of Italian film awards and was nominated for the “Best Feature” at the Chicago International Film Festival.
There’s just one tiny problem. You want to find this film? Search it in Roku and you basically get the John Travolta from Pulp Fiction GIF (pictured below).
Want to buy a physical copy? Amazon can’t help you and eBay sellers want a premium. If you do happen to find it though, boy, is it worth it. The film actually isn’t fully animated, which makes it unique for this series. The story follows a director set on making an animated film set to classical music, only to discover another studio, Frisney or Prisney, something like that, has already done it. Angered that he’s been beaten to the proverbial punch, he pushes forward with an orchestra of old ladies and an animator locked in a dungeon.
What follows is a hilarious send up on Fantasia that I might have enjoyed more than the film it’s aping. I don’t know when the last time you saw Fantasia was, but for me, I think the only time I’ve seen it was during a middle school music class. I’ve never been a huge classical music guy (despite my love of film scores). So, particularly when I saw it, the Disney version was never really going to be my cup of tea. It shouldn’t be too surprising then to learn that I loved the irreverent take on the classic.
From jump, the Disney shade is apparent. The old women and men of the orchestra kept like cattle. The “liberated artist” they needed to make the film has been kept in chains for five years. Those “leading” the film consist of a bumbling director and dictatorial maestro. The animators at Disney went on strike following the box office failure of Fantasia and the film certainly doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to its portrayal of the film’s higher ups, despite coming out more than 35 years later.
With the film cutting between the black and white of the live action moments, the animated bits set to music really pop. The multiple absurdist sketches are quite creative and the transitions to them are clever. The skits include an aging satyr chasing after nymphs, a man frustrated by his copycat community members, a world developing from the leftover of a Coke bottle, a cat envisioning a home in the rubble, a bee’s picnic interrupted by a human couple, a take on Adam and Eve, and ending with multiple absurdist finales. The sketches are all beautifully drawn, looking to my amateur eye to be animated with mix of watercolor and colored pencils. They’re colorful and, at times, trippy. The Fantasia influence can be seen, specifically in the latter sketches.
The entire film is an absurd exercise, and that absurdity just continues to increase as the film goes along. That ramping up can be correlated to how frequently the world created in the animated shorts begins to influence our live-action bits. One content note: don’t be fooled by the PG rating listed on this film. With its fair share of cartoon nudity, specifically in the satyr and Adam and Eve skits, this one isn’t exactly for the kids.
This film had an interesting effect on me. I had so much fun watching it, I don’t know whether I want to let this ridiculous version live on as my preferred version of this niche genre, or whether this means I give Fantasia another shot. Regardless of the internal battle I now have raging inside my head, I think this is one worth checking out (if you can find it), both for Fantasia fans and for those who found it perhaps a bit pretentious for their taste.
I’m excited to continue to geek out on some great animated work you may not have had a chance to catch. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you at next month’s celebration when I think I’m going to go with a fast break option for you to try ahead of Space Jam: A New Legacy.
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