THE DISNEY PLATFORMERS OF THE EARLY NINETIES ARE USUALLY HEAPED WITH PRAISE, WITH TITLES SUCH AS CASTLE OF ILLUSION, QUACKSHOT AND ALADDIN STILL STANDING OUT TODAY. IT’S EASY TO FORGET, THOUGH, THAT NOT EVERYTHING THAT LEFT THE HOUSE OF MOUSE BACK THEN WAS AUTOMATICALLY EXCELLENT…
To this day, Fantasia is probably the most un-Disney Disney film ever made. What was shown in selected American cinemas in November 1940 was unlike anything else at the time. No cartoons, no slapstick, no southern drama, no cowboys – instead classical masterpieces such as Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata And Fugue In D Minor, Modest Mussorgsky’s Night On Bald Mountain and Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria featured. It was spectacularly performed by more than a hundred members of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Maestro Leopold Stokowski, in unprecedented sound quality, and accompanied by absolutely fantastic images, whose brilliant animations are precisely synchronised to the music. With his third major animated film, Walt Disney intended to bring the beauty of classical music to the masses, tell stories exclusively in pictures and sound, and make going to the cinema a unique experience. It was a ridiculously ambitious project into which Disney himself had poured years of his life and all of his heart and soul – and which almost ruined the company when it flopped mercilessly at the box office.
Over the course of the following years, the film became a cult classic while Disney grew into a global powerhouse. A good 50 years after its premiere, Fantasia was finally ready to enter home cinemas – and an official game was planned to hit the shops at the same time. As the Disney licence was currently held by Sega, it would have made sense for the game to be created by Emiko Yamamoto and her team, who had already proven a year earlier with the excellent Castle Of Illusion that they knew exactly what to do with such an important licence. At the time, however, they were busy working on the quasi-sequel Quackshot and simply had no time for Fantasia.
And so, the contract was awarded to… Infogrames. According to Scott Berfield, the producer in charge of Disney games at Sega at the time, this was largely due to that company’s boss. “Once we had the licence, we put out a request for proposals to a few people, and Bruno Bonnell at Infogrames convinced the company that they could do the work.” He must have been very persuasive, because Infogrames had previously been known for more modest projects on PCs and home computers, had never developed for a console, and had also never developed for a brand as well-known as Disney. What’s more, the film wa
