DVDizzy Forum

JeanGreyForever wrote:I suppose Disney felt more confident in this film as live-action since it follows the Narnia/Wonderland/Oz formula they've been using.

JeanGreyForever wrote:The ballet is hugely popular in America because it's considered a staple of the holiday season and Christmas time. Which makes the introduction in Fantasia quite jarring now because of how it's referenced that nobody really knows the music for The Nutcracker. I believe The Nutcracker became a huge deal in the 1950s or around that time. The fairy tale and actual story is less known though because most people just associate it with the ballet.

It's a series of dances taken out of a full-length ballet called "The Nutcracker" that he once composed for the St. Petersburg Opera House. It wasn't much of a success and nobody performs it nowadays, but I'm pretty sure you'll recognize the music of the suite when you hear it.

The Nutcracker has been beloved by American audiences for nearly 80 years, thanks in part to Walt Disney.

His Fantasia in 1940 was the first time US audiences had seen actual dancing to accompany Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s well-known Nutcracker Suite — even though the dancers were fairies, fish, flowers and mushrooms rather than prima ballerinas. The full ballet from which the suite was excerpted wasn’t staged in the United States until 1944, in San Francisco, and it didn’t become an annual phenomenon until 10 years later, when a brief debut at New York City Ballet — in February — was so popular that it was brought back to run for a full month at the holidays.

In the decades since, Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece has conquered the world — as the international cast and crew of Disney’s upcoming adaptation, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, can attest.

The movie takes its inspiration from the same 18th-century stories adapted for the Tchaikovsky ballet, as well as from the ballet itself, but as the title promises, it takes young heroine Clara, her toy soldier companion, and her mysterious godfather, Drosselmeyer, into realms previously only hinted at.

“We landed on the idea of Clara as a very science-oriented girl” Powell (one of the screenwriters) says “someone who was maybe a little bit of a tomboy and had that mechanical sensibility that could make her view the world in a different way and give her a stronger connection to Drosselmeyer because they shared this love of inventing things and figuring out how they worked.”