DVDizzy Forum

Sotiris wrote:Before The Princess and the Frog, there was a project at WDAS called The Frog Prince developed by Eric Goldberg and his wife Susan.

DisneyAnimation88 wrote:Weren't Pixar working on an adaptation of The Frog Prince book at one point as well?

blackcauldron85 wrote:A while back you posted about Latfiya.

blackcauldron85 wrote:When I get around to pulling that out working on my long-in-the-works project, I'll make sure to share what I have!

blackcauldron85 wrote:A writer was hired in 2003...it was about a girl in Africa...

blackcauldron85 wrote:But I mostly just wanted to thank you for posting the awesome goodies you do in this thread, since this is by far my favorite topic!

Sotiris wrote:It seems that there were plans for another Mickey Mouse project prior to 2007 over at DisneyToon Studios called Mickey's Campfire Tales.

TsWade2 wrote:Man, I want that happen, but nooooooooooo! People and critics are stuuuuuuuuuuuupid!

Francis Glebas wrote:One of the most fun aspects of working on Fantasia 2000 was coming up with ideas for stories and choosing interesting music to accompany them. We listened to all kinds of classical music searching for ones that would create the right mood and narrative structure to support a visual story.

My interest in classical music actually began with cartoons. The Warner Brothers cartoons are filled with snippets of classical music. These snippets got stuck in my brain. As a young adult, I would go to the library and borrow a new composer each week. This is how I discovered that there were other giants of classical music besides Beethoven and Mozart. Some of my favorites were Debussy, Mahler and Sibelius.

One of the challenges of Fantasia is that the story has to be told purely visually. It was kind of like watching silent movies. The other challenge was that when we needed to make changes to the story, we had only so many frames to make the change within because we were locked in to the timing of the music. Sometimes these constraints can stimulate creativity. Other times they’re just a pain.

One of my favorite pieces was Stravinsky's The Firebird Suite. I thought what if Goofy were a ballet dancer starring in the Ugly Goofling, a play on the Ugly Duckling story. Well, unfortunately the idea never went anywhere but it was fun to work on and dress Goofy up in a ballet costume. Here is the design and the beat board that I used to pitch the idea.

One other tidbit about the music of Fantasia 2000 was that we occasionally had to edit the music for length. We picked which parts of the music we wanted to use. And don’t tell anyone but we even added some extra percussion to make the animations sync better. In the capable hands of legendary conductor, James Levine, these extra flourishes were completed in a very musical way. That was a real treat for me to get to work with him and even have him like Pomp and Circumstance.

Francis Glebas wrote:I came up with an idea to cast Donald Duck in the role of Icarus Duck set to Wagner's music of the Ride of the Valkyries. Some of you might know it as the helicopter theme from Apocalypse Now. Donald wants to impress Princess Daisy Duck but feels small compared to the other majestic birds like swans and cranes. So he tries to top them flying up to the sun. Big mistake. You know the rest. Disney animator, Terry Naughton helped storyboard this sequence. These were completed in the pre-digital age with pastels and grease pencils. The storyboards were pinned with pushpins to a 4x8 sheet of cork board and hung on the wall. You pitched the story using a 3 foot long wooden "pitch" stick.