Lucca Animation

Exactly ten years after its first release, Lucca Animation 2009 is screening again, in its Family Corner section, a movie where the best music ever conjoins with images animated by Disney's talent: Fantasia 2000. Conceived on the basis of its illustrious forefather, this work aims to fulfil, decades later, the unrealised dream of Walt Disney: to transform Fantasia (1940) into a work in progress, a living laboratory continuously updated with new episodes and music.

Fantasia 2000 is clearly a homage to the great audio-visual experiment of the Forties. Both films take origin from the desire to render the sounds into images, to see realised on screen the unlimited possibilities of the music together with animation. Fantasia 2000 wishes to pay tribute to the masterwork that laid the path and also to (at least technically) "overcome" it. Continuity between the forefather and the new feature is obtained presenting the - fully restored - version of the famous The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Paul Dukas.

Seven new parts are added, associated to scores of highly renowned composers. Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 accompanies the flight of coloured butterflies, Respighi's Pines of Rome is associated to the 3D "dance" of the whales; Piano Concerto No. 2 by  Šostakovič tells us of a fearless tin soldier. And again, Saint-Saëns and his The Carnival of the Animals mate with a funny pink flamingo Pomp and Circumstance, by Elgar ties with the figure of Donald Duck - Noah. Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue is sided to the stories of four characters in a frenzied New York and, finally, The Firebird Suite, by Stravinsky closes the film with the epic fight between good and evil. A work created at the threshold of a new millennium (1999), looking back (to Disney's tradition) and simultaneously forward (lots of the drawings are computer animated); a film for children and adults alike that never fails to move and excite, as it touches the hearts of all the family with the magic of animation.