Fantasia 2000 was one of my favorite movies to work on. But it was also dangerous for me. I was working on an early version of Beethoven's Fifth and wanted to find a way to look at the score while hearing the music and seeing the storyboards to link it up. This led me to discovering MIDI and computer music. Using Notator Logic an early version of Logic Pro I could watch the score while hearing the music. It really helped learn more about the music which had 20 or 30 instruments playing at one time to follow the lead melody lines and sync up with the storyboards. The dangerous part was that it rekindled my old love of playing music and lusting after unaffordable synthesizers. Computers could now recreate the old synthesizers leading me to spend a lot on music equipment and software.
Anyway back to the Duck... 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.
This is also featured as one of the bonus features on the Fantasia box set. Disney animator, Terry Naughton helped storyboard this sequence. (CLICK TO ENLARGE)
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.
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