Fig. 2: The galaxy and Earth from
space as shown in Fantasia, over a
decade before spacecrafts would
leave Earth.
|
To best see how how the segment had its influence on the APW trope (and probably many other paleoart-memes) I think it is best that we go through its sections bit by bit. We begin with an outside look of the milky way galaxy and gradually zoom in on nebulas and an angry sun that spews out literal flames (the idea that stars were powered by nuclear fusion was still new at the time and preceded by the thought that they were basically huge balls of gas or coal burning out). Comets whiz by and we zoom onto a prehistoric, red Earth. What is remarkable about this sequence is that nobody at the time had actually seen Earth from space, as it would be another 21 years until Yuri Gagarin's journey and the space race. The animation is therefore largely based on well-educated guesses of the time and for that it is very impressive for how close it came to reality. We enter the planet's atmosphere and see red and pink clouds. The music gets more dramatic as we arrive at the surface and see a red and black world dotted by volcanoes, which violently eject so much lava that it accumulates into a large stream. The river of lava flows through the landscape, destroying every rock formation in its way, until it runs over a cliff where it joins the ancient sea and is violently stopped by the floods. This segment is most likely supposed to depict Earth during the Hadean eon 4 billion years ago (although it was not called that yet), long before any animals, let alone dinosaurs, appeared. Accordingly we do not see any lifeforms yet in this scene. Nonetheless, I still have my suspicion that this movie is partially to blame for the common association between volcanoes and dinosaurs. As we have already seen in the previous parts, the idea of depicting volcanoes in the background of prehistoric scenes already existed in paleoart like that of Charles R. Knight or Gerhard Heilmann. Unfortunately I never found a concrete source saying why these artists thought the ancient past was particularly volcanically active. The best that I could gather is that the thinking was that since the Earth was younger, its interior was more heated and therefore the planet was more geologically active. From a modern perspective this is true, but only for the first billion years of the planet's formation, long before dinosaurs arrived on the scene. But before 1956 the true age of the Earth was not yet known and some scientists thought the planet was at best just 40 million years old, with the dinosaurs just living 6 to 8 million years ago. This compressed view of geologic history made the image of a super-heated early Earth roamed by dinosaurs more credible. Outdated geology does however not explain how we can even find volcanoes in pre-scientific illustrations of antediluvian times, if you remember part 1 of this series. Volcanoes are a powerful image. A mountain that spews fire and ash is impressive, terrifying and among the best ways to show the raw power of nature and primordial chaos. Perhaps it is this reason why they are often used as an element to depict uncivilized times or places. Another reason might be the association that some people have between dinosaurs and dragons (it should be mentioned that before the discovery of dinosaurs most depictions of dragons looked more like chimaeras of big cats, birds of prey and snakes than anything, only afterwards did their designs start to be inspired by dinosaurs. The Ancient Greek and Latin words for dragon originally meant large African snakes, like pythons, while the fire-breathing aspect likely originated in medieval mistranslations of snake-venom). What role does Fantasia play in all of this? I think the movie only indirectly added to this trope. Its depiction of a volcanically active Hadean is largely correct and there is no dinosaur in sight in this scene. The problem is perhaps rather that the scene that separates the volcanoes from the dinosaur-scenes does not particularly stand out. This is likely why most people only remember volcanoes and dinosaurs about this segment of Fantasia, likely not realizing that the scenes are meant to represent entirely different time periods. On a last note, I found that as far back as 1988 scientists like Gregory S. Paul seem to have been aware that dinosaur-times were not particularly more volcanic than modern day (Paul 1988, p. 232), so the persistence of this trope to this very decade is a bit puzzling and likely speaks to the sluggishness of change in popular paleoart.
Fig. 3: Primordial Earth
|
The volcanic cataclysm is followed by a literal deep-dive into the early oceans. We see the first unicellular organisms swimming around and form into multicellular creatures. This part is dark and murky, the music becoming ominous, and every evolutionary step is bookended with a mud-avalanche. We go from hydra-like cnidarians to worms and trilobites to the first fish, which are threatened by jellyfish and ammonites. Violence is as much part of Fantasia's prehistoric scenes as it was in all other paleo-media we have seen so far. This is actually intentional. The original Stravinsky ballet was about human sacrifices and it was conductor Stokowski's idea to preserve this theme, as he viewed the violence present in nature and life as a form of sacrifice too. The scene ends when a fish escapes the arms of an ammonite and evolves its fins into primitive legs. It crawls toward the shore and sticks its head out of the water. In case you were curious, in external material this fish is identified as Polypterus (Culhane 1983, p. 107), which is not actually extinct, but a modern species of lungfish. It is however interesting that the filmmakers chose to depict the evolution of legs before the fish actually gets on land. In classic depictions of tetrapod-evolution it is usually the other way around, but modern finds do indeed suggest that legs evolved before tetrapods actually started walking on land. The segment is ended with a fade to black and the next shot opens with a primitive turtle crawling onto land. In the background we see plesiosaurs, fishing and holding their necks in the typical, outdated Nessie-posture. We are now clearly in the Mesozoic. We zoom onto a pod of mosasaurs, which sport a prominent row of spines along their back. Depicting mosasaurs with spines or frills on their back is a tradition that originated with Samuel Williston's misinterpretation of trachaeal cartilage in a fossil and was popularized by Charles Knight's 1899 depiction of Tylosaurus. Today we know that mosasaurs had a smooth, perhaps blubbery and whale-like outline and, being close relatives of snakes and monitor lizards, their scalation was also smooth and uniform. Jurassic World chose to ignore both the old and new reconstruction and instead gave their mosasaur crocodile-scutes along its back, which will likely and unfortunately inspire many more popular depictions of these animals to do the same. After we watch the marine reptiles swim around we focus on a colony of Pteranodon. They are shown hanging upside down from a cliff-roof with their feet. This was a popular way of depicting pterosaurs once, with the idea being that due to their size they could only become airborne by throwing themselves off cliffs. The behaviour also was very obviously inspired by bats. Today we of course know that pterosaur-feet were terrible at grasping anything and that they could launch perfectly fine from the ground or even from water. All that said, the Pteranodon are depicted as very beautiful and elegant animals here, which I find surprising. In old depictions, especially from this era, pterosaurs were usually drawn as malicious gargoyles, with skeletal heads and sometimes even with inaccurate, demonic bat-wings. In a popular children's book from 1953, famous paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews writes about Pteranodon: "He was a fantastic, goblin-like creature. I always think of him as a witch on a broomstick that sailed through the sky" (Andrews 1953, p. 122). There is none of that here and instead the pterosaurs look sleek and colorful, glide gracefully through the sky and pick up food from the water. The scene ends when a Pteranodon that just grabbed a squid gets snatched out of the air by a lunging mosasaur, which is a motif so old and commonplace that nobody knows anymore who started it. Examples of it can be found all the way back in the nineteenth century and it was carried over to a ridiculous degree in 2015's Jurassic World. How likely such act of predation is you can imagine yourself. When was the last time you saw an orca jump out of the water to catch a pelican mid-air?
After the battle we go forward in time. The jungle and the swamps are gone, the world has become a giant desert with only a few watering holes and dried up plants remaining. The dinosaurs are still there, but barely holding on and desperately searching the ground for food and water. As conditions get even worse they form a big trek and migrate through the Mad Max-style desert. Many collapse from exhaustion, others get stuck in mudpits and harrassed by predators, all while Stravinsky's music aggressively beats them down and makes them howl for mercy. We see the once mighty Tyrannosaurus rex marching along with the other dinosaurs, unable or unwilling to attack them due to its own weakness. At last it also collapses and dies from exhaustion. We still see some dinosaurs marching on, but they disappear into a sandstorm. We know they are walking into a doomed future. This segment accurately displays what at the time was thought to be the most likely explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs. As it was thought that dinosaurs were swamp-dwellers like turtles or crocodiles, the culprit of their demise must have been a loss of habitat as the world got cooler, drier and more suitable for mammals. An explanation for this global cooling/drying was sometimes the formation of modern mountain-chains (Andrews 1953, p. 137-138), but this is omitted in this scene, which gives it an aura of mystery and ominosity. While I never found any source confirming this, I cannot help but think that this scene was also partly inspired by the Dust Bowl event that was still going on when the movie was released (for crying out loud, Deems Taylor even calls the extinction a dust bowl when introducing the segment). Due to mismanagement of farming on the Great Plains during the previous decades, a series of catastrophic droughts and duststorms began during the 1930s, which caused great economic and ecological collapse in US states such as Oklahoma and Kansas. Tens of thousands of people had to abandon their homes and livelihoods and migrated to California and other states (where the economic situation was only marginally better thanks to the Great Depression). A movie-goer in 1940 watching Fantasia must have surely been reminded of these events when he saw the dinosaurs desperately treking through the duststorm-ridden desert. While in the previous scene the dinosaurs were just bizarre-looking and brutish aliens, in their extinction one suddenly feels empathy for them, as you are reminded of real-world, current struggles. Without any sound-effects, dialogue or anthropomorphisation the Disney animators managed to humanize the dinosaurs in a way I have not seen since.
Fig. 6: Concept
art from the iconic fight between
Stegosaurus and T. rex. |
The next and final scene is one that still confuses me to this day. We do not continue with the creatures that survived the extinction, in fact nothing seems to be alive anymore at all. Instead we see a barren wasteland littered with the bones of dinosaurs. The camera zooms in on the dried up skull of T. rex, while the music plays an almost mocking tune. Then there is silence, which is suddenly broken up as the music gets increasingly more chaotic. The ground starts shaking, a seismic wave rolls across the land. Mountains burst through the ground and the bones are crushed and buried by falling rocks and tectonic cracks. A giant tidal wave approaches and rolls across the land until the continents are completely covered by the sea. The moon pushes itself in front of the sun until a total solar eclipse is formed. The last shot is again an orbital view of Earth with the eclipse in the background. Everything on the Earth's surface seems barren, as Stravinsky's music drones on omniously. With this the Rites of Spring segment of Fantasia ends. Originally Walt did not want this segment to end on such a depressing note. After the extinction of the dinosaurs there was supposed to be a scene depicting the Age of Mammals, which would then end with the first humans discovering fire and dancing happily around it, somewhat similar to Stravinsky's original ballet. This idea was scrapped, as Disney feared that Fantasia, a movie that already had troubles with distribution, would face backlash from Christian fundamentalists for connecting evolution to humans. Thus the end-scene was replaced with a more cryptic end, while both the segment and soundtrack were shortened. The latter greatly upset Igor Stravinsky, who had previously enthusiastically cooperated with Disney on the movie. Another consequence was the lack of any mammals in the entire Rites of Spring segment. In fact, there are no animals that would seem familiar to a modern human, except for the fish, turtle and perhaps the proto-bird (although it looks more like a weird lizard with glued-on feathers). No shrew-like mammals, crocodiles, snakes, lizards and so on. This makes the prehistoric world depicted here feel very removed from today, like the dinosaurs are living on their own planet and ecology, further adding to the alienness. What I also find fascinating is that while the actual extinction of the dinosaurs is shown as a gradual, strenuous process, their actual end, the destruction and burial of their bones and world, is brought about by a catastrophic great flood. This way Fantasia combines the unformitarian view of geology at the time with the earlier, religiously inspired, catastrophist one, separating the prehistoric world from our modern one again through a literal deluge of biblical proportions. The only difference to earlier depictions of the antediluvian world is that there are no survivors this time. May I remind you that this is a Disney movie?
Fig. 7: The once mighty Tyrannosaurus rex, now reduced to dry bones. |
With that I want to end this post. In the next parts we will look at the art of Zallinger and Burian and will finally come to the Dinosaur Renaissance. Thank you so much for reading this, happy holidays and a smooth leap into the new year to you.
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Literary sources:
- Andrews, Roy Chapman: All About Dinosaurs, New York 1953.
- Bakker, Robert Thomas: The Dinosaur Heresies. New Theories Unlocking The Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction, New York 1986.
- Culhane, John: Walt Disney's Fantasia, New York 1983.
- Davidson, Jane: A History of Paleontology Illustration, Bloomington 2008.
- Everhart, Michael J.: Oceans of Kansas. A Natural History of the Western Interior Sea, Bloomington 2005 (Second Edition).
- Knight, Charles Robert: Life through the Ages, New York 1946 (Commemorative Edition).
- Knoll, Andrew: Life on a Young Planet. The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth, New Jersey 2003 (Second Paperback Edition).
- Paul, Gregory Scott: Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. A Complete Illustrated Guide, New York 1988.
Online sources:
- Heilmann, Thompson, Beebe, Tetrapteryx and the Proavian by Tetrapod Zoology (ver. 4)
- Fantastic ‘Fantasia’ : Disney Channel Takes a Look at Walt’s Great Experiment in Animation by the Los Angeles Times.
Image sources:
- Fig. 1: Culhane, John: Walt Disney's Fantasia, New York 1983, p. 110.
- Fig. 2: Culhane, John: Walt Disney's Fantasia, New York 1983, p. 108.
- Fig. 3: Culhane, John: Walt Disney's Fantasia, New York 1983, p. 121.
- Fig. 4: UL: Wikimedia, UR: Fantasia, Walt Disney Productions, LL: Chambers, Paul/Haines, Tim: The Complete Guide to Prehistoric Life, London 2005, LR: Jurassic World, Universal Pictures.
- Fig. 5: Culhane, John: Walt Disney's Fantasia, New York 1983, p. 119.
- Fig. 6: Culhane, John: Walt Disney's Fantasia, New York 1983, p. 122.
- Fig. 7: Culhane, John: Walt Disney's Fantasia, New York 1983, p. 127.
This is a great article! What's your source for the pachycephalosaur being Troodon? There's no mention of it in Culhane's book.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure that's just fan speculation. I've seen other sites call it an Ornitholestes, but again I don't have any official reference.
DeleteWer im deutschsprachigen Raum musste denn den Zauberlehrling nicht in der Schule lernen?
ReplyDeleteWie immer ein super recherchierter Artikel. Ich bin auch positiv überrascht, dass du die Verbindung zwischen Dinosauriern und Drachen ansprichst. Du solltest mal einen Artikel über Drachen schreiben finde ich.