Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Fantasia"

Sorry for the delay on this one. Last night got away from me a little. Okay, a lot. Like Mickey's multiplying brooms in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" the problems in finding blog time just kept expanding. But here we are. This week I asked the Best Shot club to  look at Disney's ambitious Fantasia and choose their Best Shot from the "Rite of Spring" sequence since that riot-inducing Stravinsky composition is now 100 years old and I have a thing for Centennials. Ambitious "Sorcerer" level bloggers were asked to also choose a best shot not from the film as a whole but one from each musical sequence.

 Refresh your screen periodically for more...

Cinesnatch I knew Vinci would go the sorcerer level and choose a shot from each segment because he does that anyway even when I don't ask. Image explosions every week over at that blog! 

The Film's The Thing Abstew's magic couldn't cure him of being too sick to write up the shots this week but he still found time to conjure them. Dedication!

Hop Low (swear to God, he has a canonical name, and you can thank me whenever there's a Disney night at bar trivia that I've just helped you to win), the best example in Disney's many long decades of work of instilling personality into a non-speaking character whose face never changes. His clumsy, out-of-step dancing is pretty much as sweet and delicately-expressed as it gets, right up until he finally gets it together in and quickly arrives perfectly in place just in time for the music to stop. That's the moment in the shot I've chosen: when even the clumsy little kid is able at the last second to get everything perfect. An absolute treasure of American animation.

Antagony & Ecstacy is a True Sorcerer of the "Best Shot" series and gives you seven articles for the price of one, covering everything from Mickey Mouse's expert redesign, anthropomorphic mushrooms and exquisite control of color palettes. (If you aren't a regular reader of Tim's blog and you are obsessed with Disney animation, you are missing out. He writes about it often and with much insight)

We Recyle Movies Anne continues to break her writing hiatus for this series and we love her for it. She's also got a shot for every segment and also knows her film history. Here's one observation I wholeheartedly second:

Ostriches eating oddly-shaped fruit is never not funny.

The Entertainment Junkie Jason all loves those animals on parade, the mixture of profane and sacred and has a real recurring thing for reflected images in this series -- which I totally get. I always want to choose them, too!

Dancin' Dan remembers which parts he fast-forwarded as a child (The Rite of Spring - ha!) and loves the feeling of gliding, captured in the "Waltz of the Flowers" section

My own choices are coming soon...

NEXT WEEK'S FILM, the spring finale of Hit Me (which will return in late June or early July), is the 1963 classic "Hud" starring Paul Newman which won three Oscars including Cinematography. It's available for rental on Netflix and instant watch on Amazon Prime.