Pastoral Symphony WP

Disney’s Pastoral Symphony: An Anatomy of Domestic Life Some Working Notes William L. Benzon Abstract: The Pastoral Symphony episode in Disney’s Fantasia depicts scenes from domestic life as realized by various mythological creatures: child-rearing and play, courtship, wine-making and celebration, mutual aid and protection, and sleep. Gods are ‘played’ by human-form characters one of which, Bacchus, is central to the episode. Humans are played both by animal-human hybrids (centaurs and fauns) and by animal hybrids (flying horses, unicorns). Bacchus is accompanied by a Disney-invented hybrid, a unicorn donkey. Patterns of oral and sexual imagery are arranged in ring-form structure that runs in counterpoint to a typical cumulative dramatic structure, which is built on a contrast between the Dionysian mode of the central Bacchanal and the more Apollonian conclusion, where all’s right with the world and everything is in it’s place. The poetic function, as described by Roman Jakobson, governs various transformations and displacements that structure the visual and sonic materials in such a way that the episode has something of a ‘meta’ quality of being art about art, with Bacchus as a figure for the artist.

CONTENTS Introduction: Be It Ever so Humble, There’s no Place Like Elysium..................................... 1 Domestic Tranquility, NOT: Disney’s Pastoral ....................................................................... 4 Pastoral 2: Color and Sound..................................................................................................17 Pastoral 3: Come Dance with Me..........................................................................................23 Pastoral 4: From Orality to Mastery ......................................................................................30 Pastoral 5: Ring Form Construction ......................................................................................40 Pastoral 6: All Together Now: Nietzsche, Lorenz, Jakobson ..............................................48

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Disney’s Pastoral Symphony

Introduction: Be It Ever so Humble, There’s no Place Like Elysium I grew up watching episodes of Fantasia on TV, and saw a theatrical version in 1969, which didn’t impress me that much. It wasn’t THAT psychedelic. Then, for over three decades, nothing. I suppose I thought about the movie every so often, and perhaps recalled an episode or two, but I didn’t see it at all. When, a few years ago, I picked to DVD, I was stunned by it, the variety of animation styles, the variety of subjects. It fascinated me. I liked some episodes more than others. The Nutcracker Suite and Rite of Spring were immediate favorites. The Pastoral Symphony was my least favorite; I was almost embarrassed to watch it. How come, then, that I’ve written more about it than any of the other episodes? For one thing, by the time I got around to it, I’d learned a lot about describing and analyzing cartoons, not only from the work I’d done on the other episodes, but from work I’ve done on other cartoons as well: Miyazaki, Walter Lantz, Warner Brothers, other Disney (Dumbo), and some others here and there. I was better at my craft; I knew what to look for, and how. Then there is the episode itself. It’s one of the longest in the film—only Rite of Spring is longer—and one of the most complex. In particular, it portrays a wider range of human social life than any of the other episodes, dealing, as it does, with child-rearing, courtship, celebration, and security (from the storm). Simply describing what Disney’s depicted and how he’s organized it, that takes time. Now that I’ve been through it all I have a better sense of my embarrassment, which centered on Bacchus, though not entirely so (those centaurs are rather clunky, and that cherub’s bottom, what’s up with that?). Bacchus is given a complex job, perhaps more than he could handle. In the voice-over commentary to the version packaged with Fantasia 2000, historian Brian Sibley notes that the lead animator for Bacchus, Ward Kimball, came to think that he’d laid it on rather too thickly. Perhaps it did, but he had a tough job. As I read Bacchus, not only must he be a randy old man,, but he’s also a puddle-splashing infant. And somehow he must be both of those and be believable in the context of this movie. Well, men are randy, old, and infants, but generally not within the compass of 10 or 15 minutes. It’s one thing to be each of those in its own context, isolated from the other, but to be them all, all at once, that just rather rubs one’s nose it the absurdity, the ridiculousity, if I may, of being human. Maybe Kimball didn’t go overboard at all. Maybe he was just doing his job, and doing it well, indeed. Perhaps embarrassment was the necessary point. Whatever. In any event, I’ve made my peace with Disney’s Pastoral Symphony. I no longer find it embarrassing. Instead, I’m filled with wonder at what Disney attempted, and what he actually managed to accomplish. ***** Finally, a note on method. When I first starting writing about this episode I did not intend to make six posts, or seven including this introduction. I intended to write one post, though I knew is would be a long and complex one. Which it was. After I’d posted it I continued to think about the episode and decided that I probably needed another post, just to tie up loose ends. I wanted to say something about the thread of oral imagery that ran through the episode; there was more to be said about color; and I began to

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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1964621


suspect the episode had a ring form structure. I figured I could knock that out in another post, albeit a long and complex one. Wrong. As soon as I sat down to write I knew that one post wouldn’t be enough. I decided to pick one topic and write on that, color and sound. By the time I was done with that post I knew that I didn’t quite know where this was leading. And THAT’s how I ended up doing six posts on this episode. Much of the work was descriptive, from beginning to end. I didn’t get around to ring form until the fifth post, though I saw it coming as early as the second. The assertion that Disney’s visualization of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony has a ring form, that’s a descriptive statement. But it took a great deal of prior description and analysis to get there. My point is simply that description is neither obvious nor easy. It seems to proceed in ‘layers.’ You start at the ‘surface,’ get that laid out, and then proceed to the next layer, and the next. The order in which I wrote those posts is, in this instance, the order in which I did the descriptive work, though my mind darted all over the place in the process. That is, I didn’t make a bunch of notes, organize them, and only then start to write. Description is discovery, exploration, and one must LEARN to do it. It doesn’t come naturally. Further, it’s inevitably intertwined with analysis, and with interpretation. That is to say, it’s not as though one FIRST undertakes describing, THEN one analyzes, and ONLY THEN does one interpret. No, you’ve got to do them all, in cycles. The hermeneutic circle is an old and venerable trope. Well, that same circle might as well be the descriptive circle. The circle is the same, moving from parts to the whole to parts through acts of description, analysis, and interpretation. If it’s interpretation you’re after, then you call it the hermeneutic circle. If analysis is your game, it’s the analytic circle. Description’s my game these days, and so I now call it the descriptive circle. What I’m after, as I’ve indicated here and there, is an objective account of what’s in the text, a text that, in this case, happens to be an animated film. When I end up arguing that Disney’s Pastoral has a ring form, I believe that is an objective statement about how the episode is organized. Ring form is not something I’m projecting onto the text through my wily critical ways. It’s really there. For everyone, whether they realize it or not. Of course, it isn’t necessary that you realize it has a ring form, nor is it necessary that you know anything about transformational generative grammar in order to speak English, Japanese, or any other language. It’s there. I do understand that these methodological matters are much in dispute, so I don’t expect my assertion of objectivity to be taken at face value. Nor do I believe that it is up to me to make that determination. My job is to do the best interpretation, analysis, and description that I know how. When I say that ring form is an objectively real attribute of this episode I’m telling you what I’m up to. I’m after truth. Whether or not I’ve got it, that’s another matter. Making that determination is the job of an intellectual community. That determination must first focus on the description. If we can’t agree on that, we’ll not agree on anything else. Description isn’t all there is, but it’s where we must start the process of arriving at mutual understanding and agreement. What we’re after is understanding, explanation: Why does this film have the form it does? How does it work in the mind? In order to answer such questions in intellectually satisfying detail we must first understand just what the film is. Description is the tool for that job. *****

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This episode is available online at YouTube. Here’s one version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcgxWmQQz1w But Disney’s original version is a bit different from the current version. It had several scenes involving a centaurette called Sunflower. She’s based on an offensive nickaninny stereotype that Disney decided to excise. Thanks to a comment by ramapith,1 here’s a clip that contains those scenes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPKpFNm3QMM

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Domestic Tranquility, NOT: Disney’s Pastoral

I’ve saved the most troublesome for last, Disney’s setting of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. It was soundly criticized upon initial release, mostly, or especially, for Disney’s use and reworking of Beethoven. THAT doesn’t bother me at all. That kind of artistic license is pretty much the price of admission for Fantasia. No, what bothers me is the cuteness, but secondarily the palette. Both are obvious enough, but it’s the cuteness I want to grapple with. For THAT is one of the central criticisms of the Disney aesthetic, it’s too cute. This iscertainly not the only episode in Fantasia where cuteness rears its ugly head. Yet it’s not bothersome in the dancing mushrooms, and it’s easily set aside in the goldfish and the baby dinosaurs. But it’s front and center in the Pastoral. Moreover, the Pastoral is in the heart of Disney’s imaginative world, for it’s about family life. The first segment shows us a family of winged horses—inspired by Pegasus— mother, father, and children. One of the children takes its first flight before our wonderstruck eyes. Then see the little ones at play and the whole family parading majestically across the sky. That’s the heart of Disney country. And its followed by courtship, a rousing party, a storm that drives adults to protect children and males to protect females, and then the storm breaks, out comes the sun. Everyone’s happy. The sun sets. Bedtime. Why all the treacle, in the character designs, in the actions, and in the palate? Let’s work our way through it.

A Day in the Life The segment opens with a shot of Mount Olympus, and it will end there as well. We see bright fields with scampering unicorns and fauns. One of the fauns plays the pan pipes.

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Here Disney does something he doesn’t do anywhere else in the film. The faun’s playing matches a part in the symphony, as though that particular bit of music were being played by the faun. This will happen a half dozen or so time throughout the segment. It has the effect of bringing the music into the action rather than having it being, well, an accompaniment to it. Whether or not this is an incidental feature of this segment or it is somehow organically linked to Disney’s purpose is not clear to me, though I’ve not been able to come up with a rationale for such linkage. The mere fact that it happens, however, is sufficient to justify mentioning it. After a bit more romping we see the winged horses and, in particular, a mother and child. First we see the child suckling, then it stands:

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This child will take its first flight—at least, it is logical to assume that it is its first flight. That involves a number of gags, but, once the little nipper gets going he joins the family in parading across the sky. They land in the water and, as they’re swimming, we get perhaps the loveliest sequence in this episode. A whole herd of flying horses spirals across the sky and lands in the water:

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The effect of the reflections moving on the surface of the water is marvelous. Of course they move in parallel to the horses themselves, but they also cut through the family that is already in the water, playing around. This segment gives way to the second movement, which depicts the courtship of centaurs and centaurettes, aided and abetted by dozens of cute cherubs. The centaurs are awkwardly designed and stiffly animated. The centaurettes fare rather better and John Culhane is right to praise their facial expressiveness (Walt Disney’s Fantasia p. 141). One of the loveliest moments occurs when one of the cherubs positions a dove’s wing so as to form a hat for a coy centaurette:

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And perhaps the worst moment in the episode comes at the end of this segment, after three cherubs have successfully introduced a lonely centaur and a lonely centaurette to one another. The three of them draw a curtain over the scene, but one lingers on, peeking through the curtain to observe the scene. Here we see his every so cute little bottom:

In a few frames that will morph into a heart. So cute and adorable. Yuck! Now we get to the heart of the episode, the middle segment, the Bacchanal. It opens with fauns, centaurs, and centaurettes bringing grapes to a large wooden vat and the fauns dancing on the grapes while gleefully playing their pipes—as though they were the source of soundtrack music. Then Bacchus enters, flanked by centaurettes, attended by fauns, beneath a canopy held up by cherubs, and riding a donkey that’s considerably smaller than he is:

After this bit of business and that, the dancing begins, centaurs, centaurettes, and Bacchus himself, the randy old goat. Well, not a goat, but obviously randy, he dances with a number of centaurettes, one after another:

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But Bacchus is thoroughly drunk and can’t stay on his feet. So he ends up sitting on the ground, not merely embracing, but kissing—no, not a centaurette—his donkey! What next? Well, what next is that a cloud looms over the scene:

The sky darkens and rain begins to fall, a fierce rain. Everyone scurries for cover. Fauns, unicorns, centaurs and centaurettes, and flying horses—there’s a sense of real danger and distress. Thus a centaurette rescues a young unicorn stranded on a rock in the river; the cherubs huddle fearfully inside a temple; and a centaur sounds the alarm (yet another of those moments where the music emanates from onscreen action):

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But the real action in this sequence comes from Zeus, who hurls thunderbolts down to earth. He doesn’t aim them just anywhere. He aims them at Bacchus:

Here he chases Bacchus and his donkey across a field:

At this point they’ve taken refuge behind a tree, which Zeus zaps:

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And all the creatures come running out from behind that tree:

We follow various creatures here and there before once again joining Bacchus, who seeks refuge under the wine-making vat. Which promptly gets zapped:

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The grape juice spills from the vat, floods the land, and Bacchus ends up playing in a puddle of grape juice. He’s OK:

At this point Zeus looses interest and indicates that Vulcan should stop forging lightening bolts. Which he does. Zeus falls asleep. The storm is over. [Note: Yes, I know that “Zeus” is a Greek name and “Vulcan” and “Bacchus” are Roman. But those are the names Disney’s team gave to these creatures.] There’s no climax at all. Or, rather, the bursting of the vat and the flowing of wine, THAT was the climax. We’re now into the denouement. Page 12


Which is utterly uneventful, but lovely here and there. The sun comes out, everyone’s happy, night descends, everyone goes to sleep, and we end with another shot of Mount Olympus:

What Just Happened? As I indicated at the beginning, this episode is about domestic life. First, parents and children, represented by the flying horses. Then we have courtship between centaurs and centaurettes, which is followed by the Bacchanal, then the storm, and, at last, happy good night for everyone. We have five segments, with the Bacchanal in the middle. The action’s in the Bacchanal and in that storm. Why did Zeus specifically target Bacchus, that rotund randy fellow who ended up kissing a donkey? Let’s set-aside all the cuteness, and especially the depiction of Bacchus—I have a vague memory that one reviewer termed him “Bacchus in diapers” but I can provide no citation—and think of this as, well, as myth. Bacchus is the Roman version of the Greek Dionysus, who was the son of Zeus (the guy hurling the thunder bolts). Bacchus/Dionysus2 is associated with wild passionate rites3 where anything goes, and that most certainly includes sex. If those centaurettes were sexy women and Bacchus were a virile young man we’d have no trouble believing that there were sexually interested in one another and that, given a suitable opportunity, they’d have sex.

2 3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacchanalia

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But they’re not. Well, the centaurette IS sexy, in a centaurette kind of way, and we’ve just had a segment where centaurs and centaurettes were courting, and you know what THAT leads to, don’t you? So, yes, she’s sexy, but since she’s a centaurette we don’t have to take her sexuality seriously. As for Bacchus, he’s an obese old man. The idea of him have a sexual relationship with a nubile young woman, well, that’s JUST disgusting. Which is the point. It’s so disgusting that THAT cannot possibly be what’s going on there on the dance ground, even though he dances with centaurette after centaurette and one even beckons to him. No, it’s not happening. Except that it very obviously is. That the women aren’t human and the man is old and fat, that’s all camouflage, plausible deniability. In psychoanalytic talk, it’s defense. And the big defense is when the drunken Bacchus ends up kissing his donkey. How silly. How very silly. No sex there. Well, a couple of years later, 1944, Walter Lantz made a cartoon called Abou Ben Boogie, a companion to The Greatest Man in Siam.4 The singer in Abou Ben Boogie is modeled on the same character as the sexy daughter in Greatest, and she’s wooed by a strapping young man. One of the running gags is that the sexy singer gets swapped for a camel while the young man doesn’t know it. Here we see the last version, which ends the cartoon:

There’s no doubt that there’s a sexual interaction between Abou Ben Boogie and the singer. But there are, of course, limits to what can be depicted on screen. There are limits to how far you can go, as it were. But, if you are clever, you can go further, or at least gesture toward what’s next along the line, by substituting. So, you swap out the woman and swap in a camel. The 4

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juxtaposition is so absurd that it effectively disguises what’s really going on. Which is that Ben Boogie and the lady are making the beast with the two backs. And so it is in the bacchanal sequence with Bacchus and the centaurettes. Except that his donkey has been substituted for a centaurette. He can embrace and kiss the donkey and no one’s sensibilities are offended. It’s a good gag, just a good gag. But obviously someone’s sensibilities WERE offended. Because that’s when the sky clouds over, just as Bacchus and his donkey were getting down to business. And, as we’ve seen, it’s Bacchus who’s the target of those thunder bolts. That storm isn’t just any storm. It’s a storm about him, and his actions, and their implications. The storm ends those Bacchanalian revels, it ends the license, it ends the fun. THAT’s why Zeus took aim at Bacchus. The old killjoy in the sky wanted to restore order. But what ends the storm? The destruction of the grape vat, that’s what. And it’s the wine of the grape that’s the agent of all that licentiousness, no? And Bacchus presides over that, no? Now, and here we’re swinging for the rafters, doesn’t sexual intercourse usually end in an explosion of fluid, and isn’t that what we get when the vat, under which Bacchus is hiding, gets zapped? After that, what happens? Relaxation and sleep maybe? Bacchus and the donkey play around in a puddle of grape juice and Zeus goes to sleep. It all fits. And it’s outrageous. But then, that’s how things go, isn’t it? A couple more observations and we’re done. Notice that we don’t see any winged horses in either the courtship segment or the bacchanal. Their segment is about parents and children, and about children learning how to move about in the world. Disney keeps that separate from courtship, in the second segment, and licentious revelry, in the thirds. That makes sense. But the horses do make a brief appearance in the storm sequence. A young one is having trouble flying and he’s retrieved by mother and taken back to the nest. The storm threatens all. In the final sequence, when the sun comes out and then the night falls, all the creatures are on stage, including the winged horses. The youngsters are now frolicking in the sky, and with the cherubs, those cute creatures that fostered the romance that leads to sex that leads to babies:

Cherubs lead to babies, yes they do. Here they are, next to one another, but in such a way that the causal relationship is utterly obscure. Which is how art sometimes works.

To Cuteness, and Beyond? Make no mistake, Disney’s Pastoral is plagued both with cuteness and with a garish color scheme. Yet, in standard Freudian fashion, the repressed keeps popping up anyhow. The Page 15


sexuality that Disney, on behalf of middle America, repressed, it snuck in there anyhow. The vat exploded and all’s right with the world. Yes, Disney DID sanitize his world, but we can go overboard with that charge. His Rite of Spring sequence ended in gruesome lingering deaths for those dinosaurs, a sobering experience to take into the lobby at intermission. He followed the Pastoral with Dance of the Hours. One can argue whether or not those animals are cute, but they sure had big eyes. More to the point, they had trouble keeping in role.5 They keeping losing touch with the roles they were supposed to be dancing and, instead, lapsed into, well, mere animals. Isn’t that what happens in a good rousing bacchanal? You get so drunk that you’ll even fail to attend to the difference between a person and a donkey. And then we have Night on Bald Mountain,6 the other Fantasia episode framed by a mountain. That episode too has frenzied revelry at its center. But, where the revelry in the Pastoral is stopped by a dominating male figure, the Bald Mountain revelry is stoked by a dominating male figure, as though it were the Pastoral’s negative transformation. And beyond this film there’s Dumbo.7 Yes, Dumbo is cute, and Disney plays him for all he’s worth. But the film takes a soberly cynical view of circus management and is straightforward in depicting the back-breaking physical labor required to run a circus. Alas, Disney never did another film like Dumbo. That remained a world unexplored. Nor did he do another Fantasia, though his successors gave it a go with the inferior Fantasia 2000.8 For whatever reason he was never able to integrate these diverse aspects of human life into a single coherent aesthetic vision. What we get is fragmented and scattered. And, often enough, as it is in Fantasia, magnificent. ***** It’s a good thing you can’t bring an intellectual property suit against someone who ‘infringes’ on your intellectual property even before you created that property. If THAT were possible then no doubt St. Jobs would have sued Disney for infringing on his logo:

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http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/11/animal-passion-hyacinth-hippo-and-ben.html http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/09/disney-agonistes-night-on-bald-mountain.html 7 http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Essays/Dumbo/Dumbo.htm 8 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/fantasia-2000-isnt-as-good-as-fantasia.html 6

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Pastoral 2: Color and Sound It seems that I’m not done with Disney’s Pastoral. I want to think about Disney’s palette in the Pastoral in this post and I’m planning another post on the dance sequence. It’s not simply that the colors are often garishly saturated. They’re often unnatural as well, and the forms are highly stylized, as we see in the next five frame-grabs. The first two come quite early in the film, shortly after the establishing shot of Mount Olympus at dawn. The next two are near the end of the first segment while the last comes early in the courtship segment.

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I’ve decided that there’s more here than simple exploration and extension of visual possibilities, though there is that. The imagery in the Pastoral episode is the most highly stylized imagery in the film, even more than in the Ave Maria. And one cannot help but be aware of it: Whoa! Those colors, those shapes! Disney establishes this awareness early and definitively in the episode.

Rainbow Delight And he amplifies that awareness in the last segment, where a rainbow appears after the storm. Disney revels in that rainbow. It’s the main event in the sequence. The visual point of rainbows, of course, is color, and color is what images are made of, color and form. Notice how Disney has the characters work with the color:

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Look closely at the wine Bacchus is drinking; it has all the colors of the rainbow. He’s drinking the color. Now the cherubs and the young horses take flight into the rainbow.

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They’ll play IN the color for 45 seconds or so, which is a substantial length of time. Disney works hard to immerse us in the color. Yet it’s not simply that these children are playing in color. We’re also to notice that it’s the young horses playing with cherubs. Why’s that significant? Because the cherubs have an ambiguous place in the episode.

Cherubs and the Fourth Wall They appear in the second sequence, the courtship sequence. They observe the courting, but they also participate in it, creating hats for the centaurettes and, at the end, making a match. They’re outside the main action, but manage it and comment on it. At the very end of the sequence, when the match has been made, the cherubs draw a curtain across the scene. Where did that curtain come from? Do such curtains hang around here and there in the Elysian Fields? Perhaps. And perhaps Disney is just having the cherubs step outside the scene entirely as a way of marking a sharp transition to the next sequence, the Bacchanal. In so doing, of course, he pushes the audience out of the scene as well, making us aware of the staginess of it all. It’s the cherubs that do that. They’ll reappear in the storm segment, where they flee, cower, and hide. And they reappear here, at the end, where they play with young winged horses. Now they’re thoroughly ‘inside’ the action and thus inside the film. They’ve assumed the same status as the horses. By linking these two sets of characters together in the midst of rainbow color Disney is, in effect, intermixing the ‘inside’ (the flying horses) and the ‘outside’ (the cherubs) of his fictional world, the imaginary events and our awareness THAT they are imaginary. It’s not simply that Disney is going ‘meta’, breaking the fourth wall 9 as he does when the cherubs draw the curtain, but he’s playing around while doing so. If you will, he’s flirting with us, and with his characters. And that, I suggest, is how we are to understand those moments where it is as though part of Beethoven’s score is being played by an onscreen character. By breaking the ‘wall’ between the characters and the soundtrack, Disney calls attention to the music itself and to the conventionalized relationship between music and visible action. Just before the Pastoral Disney had that intermission episode10 in which we saw the correspondence between musical sound and visual images. That, I suppose, is not so much that the sound caused the image, but that the sound and the image are both manifestations of the 9

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_wall http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/11/jamming-soundtrack-fantasias.html

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same thing. Then there’s the opening episode, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. As I observed in my post on that episode: ... the changes in the imagery are synchronized to the music. The sparkles, bows, waves, disks, and so forth, move in time to the music. Transitions between one type of imagery and another are synchronized with the transition from one musical phrase to another. To the extent that it makes sense to talk of causality in this fantastic world, it is the music that drives motion in the imagery and causes one type of imagery to give way to another.11

There’s an echo of that effect in the relationship between the fauns’ horn playing and the unrolling carpet. Thus in this episode Disney calls our attention both to color and to music, the dual substance of his art while at the same time unfolding a sexually charged panorama of domestic life. It’s an astonishing conception. Perhaps a bit overwrought, but nonetheless astonishing. As for the cuteness, I’ve almost forgotten about it. Almost.

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Pastoral 3: Come Dance with Me Let’s take a close look at the dance sequence in the Disney’s realization of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. As I indicated it ends with Bacchus kissing his donkey. I want to see how they got there. The sequence starts with Bacchus in the middle of an opening in the forest, drinking away as the centaurs and centaurettes dance figures around him. He soon joins in, dancing with one centaurette after another (3rd, 4th, and 5th frame following, the centaurette in the 6th seems to be the same as the one in the 3rd).

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Now the donkey slips in for a turn. And only a turn. But Disney’s established that the donkey is a suitable dance partner.

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[BTW what’s that horn in the middle of the donkey’s forehead? How’d that unicorn feature get transposed into this donkey, and why? Inquiring minds want to know.] Another turn with a centaurette:

Then it’s into the center:

While yet another centaurette beckons from not-so-afar. She moves away, Bacchus follows, falls, and sits on the ground, drinking away for a moment.

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But he gets up and goes back into the fray and, after missing a centaurette or two, manages to grab a centaurette’s tail—a body part she shares with donkeys. But he can’t hang on; she twirls and he goes flying into the air:

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He’s flying high and heading toward his donkey and two fauns. The fauns manage to get out of the way. The donkey does not. Bacchus grabs him by the forepaws, presumably thinking he’s a centaurette, and gives him a kiss upon landing:

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And that’s it. The sky will cloud up, and everyone will head for cover. We’re into the next sequence in the film. The important thing to notice is that pass in the middle, the one where Bacchus does a figure with his donkey. He’s open-eyed for that one; he knows what he’s doing. And the donkey seems to proud and happy too. That’s where Disney sets us up for the ending. It’s as though, in this setting, a donkey’s as good as a centaurette. At the end, things are a bit different. Bacchus is a bit drunker, he’s dizzy from spinning, and he’s blinded by a bunch of grapes over his eyes. He can’t see that it’s his donkey he’s kissing. It’s when he realizes the truth that the storm comes and the episode moves to a new phase.

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Pastoral 4: From Orality to Mastery

While I emphasized sexual imagery, both explicit and implicit, in my initial post on this episode, Domestic Tranquility, NOT: Disney’s Pastoral, it also has a good deal of oral imagery. That’s what I want to discuss in this post. Oral imagery shows up well before any sexual imagery. It’s there at the beginning, albeit in a very special form, that of an on-screen character playing a musical line from Beethoven’s score. As I indicated before, this is the only episode in the whole film where that happens, and it happens several times throughout the episode. Further, the instrument is always a wind instrument, never a stringed instrument, though Beethoven’s symphony abounds in strings. In the first case we see a faun playing pan pipes. He’s joined by other fauns, all piping and dancing away, and they’re joined by unicorns. Then one faun and one unicorn get to playing around. The faun climbs a pedestal and alternately plays a riff on the pipes and strikes poses, as though he were a statue, while unicorn attempts to make sense of it this harmless trickery. At the end of this back and forth the unicorn licks the faun on the face:

Think of it as an oral link between a faun and a unicorn. We’ll see other such links. Then we have the young winged-horse at breakfast, then licking his lips afterward:

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After that we see one sibling nibble at some flowers and another eat grapes:

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Flowers will appear as a motif in the second movement, which is about courtship, while grapes will run riot in the third, showing us wine-making, drinking, and dancing. There is at least one more case of on-screen piping in this first movement, just before the transition to the second. As the second movement evolves we see a cherub pluck a grape from a vine and then present it to a centaurette. She kisses it and the cherub then eats it:

In another scene a centaurette feeds grapes to a recumbent centaur:

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Do those grapes have any cherubic magic infused into them? Whether or not they do, the cherubs close out the movement by playing pipes to entice he and she to meet:

At this point music has actively entered into the story as an agent forging certain kinds of relationships. That movement gives way to the third, the Bacchanal, which opens with centaurs and centaurettes carrying baskets of grapes to a large wooden vat while fauns pipe merrily away. Some of the fauns are inside the vat, piping and stomping. At one point one faun spews grape juice from his pipes. Now we’ve got grapes, and their juice, explicitly identified with music, forging another oral knot.

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Then Bacchus enters with his entourage and we have the single most intense bit of oral imagery in the film. One of Bacchus’s attendants refills his cup. He then pours the wine into his donkey’s mouth while sticking out his own tongue for a taste. The donkey drinks, smacks his lips, and burps in satisfaction:

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Note that this donkey, like unicorns, has a horn on its forehead. Perhaps Disney wants us to recall that earlier image where a unicorn licked the face of a piping faun. Perhaps that horn is also phallic. Who knows? We’ve seen how the dance unfolds in the previous post, Pastoral 3: Come Dance with Me. Bacchus gets drunker and drunker and ends up kissing his donkey:

Now the merriment ends and Zeus conjures up a storm and zaps Bacchus and his donkey with thunderbolts. The last one destroys the grape vat and, by implication, puts a damper on further oral (and sexual) pleasures.

Still, Bacchus and his donkey manage to exact some last oral pleasure as they sit in a river of spilled wine, playing and drinking:

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Then a centaur stands on a promontory and signals “all clear” with a horn call. The storm is over and the last movement can begin.

As I indicated in Pastoral 2: Color and Sound, this segment focuses on a rainbow and, in particular, on the cherubs and winged horses playing in that rainbow. Disney focuses on one winged horse in particular:

That’s the youngster we first saw suckling. Then, still in the first movement, there’s a sequence where he takes his first uncertain flight, helped by his mother. While he flies with his family through the rest of that movement he’s clearly more awkward than his older siblings. That awkwardness is gone in his rainbow flying. He flies with strength, ease, and confident Page 38


playfulness, alternately chasing and being chased, and swimming on the water and under it as confidently as he flies. How’d that happen? I suppose we could imagine that he spent the day furiously practicing while we were watching the courtship and the dancing. But that sort of real-world answer won’t do. For this is not the real world. This is fantasy. And fantasy answers such questions in a different way. But not here and not now. Here’s the last oral gesture in the film:

As the youngsters swim away in the rainbow (you can see it on the surface of the water) a faun pipes away. This scene will give way to a group scene where all the characters gather on a promontory to watch the setting sun. Later.

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Pastoral 5: Ring Form Construction

At the time when I’d finished my previous post (Pastoral 4: Orality and Mastery) on oral imagery, I figured that my next post would be my last. I was wrong. This, my next post, is not that one. This is something that had been brewing during the orality post and that I figured I could toss off as one section in the final post. But, as I thought about that last post, everything got larger and larger, but especially this topic. So this has become a separate post. The topic is one I’ve already addressed, but in connection with a post in which I discussed both The Nutcracker Suite and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,12 that of ring form. I’ve now come to suspect that the Pastoral episode has a ring form as well.

Looking for a Structural Center in a Temporal Work The idea is that this episode has a section that is structurally central and that the other sections are somehow arranged around that. Why would I think that? Well, for one thing, the episode has five sections, which means that one of them is, numerically at least, central. That’s the Bacchanal. What would it mean for that to be structurally central? Imagine for a moment that, instead of a film, we were examining a painting on five panels, perhaps an altar piece. Let us imagine that this central panel was larger than the others and that it depicts, say, Christ on the cross, or the Madonna and Child, well-known objects of veneration in Christian art. The other four panels have figures in them as well, and those figures are all looking toward the central image. All of that indicates that the middle panel is also compositionally and iconographically central. This is not, of course, a required feature of paintings spread over five panels. I have no trouble imagining a set of Chinese or Japanese painted screens with five panels where none of the panels is compositionally more important than the others. That’s a very different kind of composition. In that case the fact the one of the five panels is numerically in the middle is structurally irrelevant. That’s not what interests me. What’s worse, what interests me is a work of temporal art, a film. In the case of a painting one can see all five panels at a glance and one can easily run one’s eyes over the panels in whatever pattern is interesting and convenient. One can grasp and examine the entire composition. That’s not possible with a film, which unfolds in time. One can see and hear only what’s unfolding at the moment, though one can recall previous sights and sounds and anticipate future ones. This pretty much means that, if there is some section that is structurally central, one is not likely to register it as such at the time for the simple reason that one doesn’t know what’s coming up and so has no way of assessing centrality. Ring form works unconsciously. One discovers it only through deliberate analysis.

Centaurette to Bacchus to Donkey The episode’s five-part structure holds open the possibility of ring form, but that possibility is not what set me thinking. What tipped me off is a scene within that third section, the Bacchanal. And not so much a scene as a shot, the one where Bacchus pours wine into his donkey-unicorn’s mouth and which then becomes a close-up of the donkey-unicorn smacking his lips. The shot’s about nine seconds long and is, I believe, the longest close-up in the episode, and the strangest (I haven’t actually measured the others, such as the ‘hatting’ of the 12

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centaurettes in the second segment). It ends with the donkey looking us in the eye, albeit rather unsteadily so, the only place in the episode where that happens:

There’s only one other place in the film where that happens, in the Arabian Dance sequence of The Nutcracker; and it happens in the middle of that sequence as well, with the sexy goldfish. Further, if oral imagery IS important in this episode, as I’ve indicated, though not really argued, in the previous section, then this is also the longest single bit of oral imagery. And it’s interesting on other counts as well. In the first place, the wine is poured into Bacchus’s cup by a centaurette whose human half appears to be black or, if you will, African-American, though, obviously, there’s not context within the film to establish any kind of American identity. Bacchus is flanked by two such centaurettes, who also have zebra-striped bodies, marking the African connection I suppose. There’s only one other black centaurette in the film, and she’s been cut out of current versions. She appeared as a maid servant in the courtship sequence. The stereotyping apparently was so bad that she had to be cut from the film. The point, of course, is that it isn’t just any centaurette who poured the wine. No, the wine is poured by one who is visibly marked as being Other, as being different from the standard run of centaurettes. Similarly, Bacchus is one of only three ‘pure’ human forms in the episode. Zeus and Vulcan are the other two. Both of them are broad-shouldered and thickly muscled; that is, they are physically highly masculine types.

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Bacchus is not, he’s rounded, rotund, at the very least he’s not-masculine, if not quite feminine. Or perhaps he’s infantile—recall how he splashes around in the wine after the vat’s been destroyed and then again at the very end where he’s sitting in rainbow patterned water. And the donkey, the donkey isn’t a donkey, but has a unicorn horn. For all I know there may well be donkey-form unicorns in some mythology, but such creatures aren’t standard in Greek or Roman mythology. They appear to have been invented by Disney’s staff. That is to say, they are anomalous. What we have then is an atypical centaurette pouring wine into a cup held by a nonmasculine male which then spills into the mouth of another creature that’s atypical, even for this mythological bunch, the unicorn-donkey. And it’s wine that’s being poured, a substance whose purpose is to put one into a mental state in which one’s thoughts and actions are lax, as is certainly the case with Bacchus. All of which is to say that this shot is Very Strongly Marked, both in terms of its visual form—a sustained facial close-up leading to direct eye contact—and the characters it links together, all atypical. Anyone who’s earned their Junior Semiotician merit badge can see that this shot is VERY IMPORTANT. That doesn’t necessarily make it structurally central. Let us note, however, that it does occur more or less in the middle of the Bacchanal, which, in turn, is in the middle of the entire episode. The Bacchanal is roughly three minutes long and this shot happens early in the second minute. More important, before this shot the action involves filling the vat and stomping the grapes; after this shot the action switches to drinking and dancing. At least within this scene, then, it marks a turning point. Now it’s beginning to look like a structural center. It’s the middle of the middle and what goes before is different from what comes after.

Widening the Ring: First and Last Let’s look at the first and last segments. The first opens at dawn and takes us into early morning while the last straddles the transition from dusk to night. That’s very promising because it makes one transition obviously the reverse of the other: night to day vs. day to night. Yet that’s just a bit too easy. We need more. And we’ve got it. In the first segment we’re introduced to a young winged horse whom we first see suckling. And then we see it take its first flight and we see its awkward movements in the rest of that segment.

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Its awkwardness is stressed by setting it among siblings and peers who move more gracefully and confidently. But that has changed by the last sequence, when that same youngster is shown flying and swimming about with ease and confidence. That behavioral change is the sort of thing that leads me to believe that, yes, the last segment is opposite to, explicitly in contrast with the opening segment. Just how that change came about is something of a mystery. But that’s OK. What’s important is simply that there is change and thus contrast. Now, in psychoanalytic thinking, there’s more to orality than just the use of the mouth. Psychoanalytic theory is developmental; that is, it is about how the mind develops from birth into adulthood and then, ultimately to the end of adulthood, though most of the emphasis and thinking has, I believe, been on infancy through adolescence. In this development, orality is the first phase of psychosocial development (see, e.g. Erik Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed, 1982). For the young infant, the mother is the center of the world, if not the entire world, and feeding at the breast is the central activity, hence orality. Orality is thus associated with dependence. In that context, then, the confident flying in the last segment is a sign of independence from the mother. That youngster can now get about in the world on its own, independently of mother. And that’s what we see. It flies and swims with the cherubs, and with siblings and peers, with mother nowhere in sight. Of course, this youngster is by no means totally independent of mother; Disney doesn’t want us to believe that. At the very end we see him settling down for the night under mother’s wing, along with his siblings. But there’s no sense of the breast or feeding at this point. The youngster is lying on his back with his muzzle away from the breast:

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As a final contrast with the first segment I note that in that various groups of creatures going about their own business. We see the unicorns and fauns at the opening, and then the action moves to the centaurs. But we don’t see the unicorns, fauns, and centaurs all together. In the last segment there’s a shot where all the creatures are gathered together on a promontory observing the blazing sun.

Widening the Ring: Second and Fourth What, then, do we make of the second and fourth segments, courtship and the storm? I note first that we have a complete change of scene and characters from the first to the second segment. Yes, this is obvious, but it is also an important feature of how the episode is organized. There’s also a break from the second to the third (middle) segment. The scene and the nature of the activity shifts radically, though the centaurs and centauretts remain on stage, while the cherubs are dropped in favor of a reappearance of the fauns. But the shift from the third (middle) segment to the fourth is not so discontinuous. Yes, the mood changes, and does so quickly, but the scene and characters are the same. Then, as the segment moves along, the centaurs, centaurettes and Bacchus remain on stage while the flying horses and unicorns return. And they remain present for the fifth and last segment and, again, the transition from fourth to fifth is continuous. So we now have a formal distinction between the first half and the second half of the episode. Transitions from segment to segment are discontinuous in the first half—one  two, two  three—and continuous in the second half—three  four, four  five. Now, when the cherubs show up in the second segment, they aren’t just a new set of characters, along with the centaurs and centaurettes. They’re also a new kind of actor. They’re creatures of the air who facilitate interaction among the ground creatures, the centaurs and centaurettes. This segment is about courtship, and that’s what the centaurs and centaurettes do, but they’re helped by the cherubs. We don’t have any such helping characters in the first segment nor in the third. But we do in the fourth, though the ‘helping’ is of a different kind. Again, creatures of the air, Zeus and Vulcan. The cherubs are infants of unspecified gender while Zeus and Vulcan are adult males. But, on the surface they wouldn’t seem to be helpers. They aren’t facilitating interactions among the other creatures, including the cherubs. Rather, they’d seem to be wreaking havoc. But, consider what actually happens on the ground. While Zeus tosses the thunderbolts at Bacchus, centaurs and centaurettes seek shelter together:

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A centaurette rescues a unicorn:

And a mare rescues one of her children:

Characters are goaded into action and in such a way that they are brought closer together, if only in twos, threes, and fours. So, two and four are alike in that they involve intervention by creatures of the air. The two sets of creatures are unlike one another (infant vs. adult, gender neutral vs. male) and act in different ways. And yet, ultimately their actions have similar effects, creatures are brought together.

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The final action in this segment, of course, is the destruction of the vat of grape juice / wine. I’ve already offered a sexual interpretation of this event. Now I’ll offer another interpretation: The destruction of the vat puts an end to oral dependency. Drinking is obviously an oral activity, and Bacchus’s drinking (and dancing) dominated the second half of the middle segment, but there are explicit ‘grape events’ in the first and second segments. In the first segment one of the youngsters was eating a bunch of grapes and in the second segment we have the grape kiss and the centaurette feeding grapes to a centaur. The destruction of the vat all but puts an end to the grape / oral imagery. Yes, after the vat was destroyed Bacchus sits in a puddle tasting spilled juice/wine, but mostly he and his companion, the donkey-unicorn, play around in the wine. Then, in the last segment, we see Bacchus drinking, but it’s not wine that’s flowing from the cup, it’s rainbow water, whatever THAT is:

Once again we see drinking again, but Bacchus is drinking something else, something infused with color, the very substance of these images. And he’s not acting like he’s drunk at all. All of a sudden he’s transformed, as is everyone else. The storm’s over, there’s a rainbow in the sky. It’s a new world. So, is the destruction of the vat sexual or is it the end of (a certain kind of) orality? Why not both? But that’s a discussion for the next, and I hope the last, post about Disney’s Pastoral.

Formal Counterpoint It’s time to bring this to a close. What we have in this segment is a kind of formal counterpoint. On the one hand we have the ring form that I’ve been discussing. But that is superimposed on a cumulative and forwarddriving structure that’s perhaps most obvious in the music. The fourth segment is the dramatic climax of the music, with it’s dramatic thunder-claps, including the most dramatic one of all, the one that destroys the vat. From that point the mood changes and evolves to celebration in the last segment. Then, as we’ve already seen, there’s an overall pattern of accumulating characters: 1. 2. 3. 4.

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But in the fourth segment, while all hands are on deck, as it were, they’re under threat from the storm, and we see two rescues. In the fifth and final segment not only are all hands on deck, but peace has been restored to the world. The cherubs and young flying horses are at play, in which they are joined by the nominally adult Bacchus, who’s traded drunken lechery for drinking rainbow water—a figure for making art, perhaps? Finally, I note that this segment has more kinds sky creatures than any of the others: Iris brings the rainbow; Apollo, the sun; Morpheus, the night; and Diana, the moon. Now, perhaps, we’re reading for a final post that puts everything together.

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Pastoral 6: All Together Now: Nietzsche, Lorenz, Jakobson Toward a Compositionist Aesthetics in which Nothing is Hidden, All is Revealed In the past several decades the standard modes of literary and film criticism have sought to find hidden meanings. The artistic work was thus conceived as a device to smuggling various meanings though lines of conscious defense. When the critic had found those hidden meanings, his or her work was done. Under such a critical regime the psychological patterns I’ve found in earlier posts—sexual in the first (Domestic Tranquillity, NOT) and third (Come Dance with Me), oral in the fourth (From Orality to Mastery)—are such hidden meanings. In that regime everything else I’ve looked—the treatment of sound and color, ring form, cuteness—all that’s just deceptive camouflage. Now that the critic—that’s me, but you as well—has penetrated it, it can be discarded in favor of the REAL meaning, that ‘hidden’ sexual stuff. The major problem with such readings is that they, in effect, discard the artistry, treating the text or film as an odd species of argument that makes its point almost completely by indirection. Well, if that’s what’s REALLY going on, then why not make the argument directly and dispense with all the artistic window dressing? It’s not a very convincing style of criticism, though it’s been the norm for half a century. I was trained in such criticism, among other things, and have come to believe we need something more. Just what isn’t entirely clear. But what I’ve been doing with the Pastoral episode— indeed, with all of Fantasia—is to explore other ways of looking at, in this case, film. In this regime, the one I’m making up, that psychological material is still there, but I don’t regard it as particularly hidden nor do I think that pointing it out is the ultimate goal of criticism. That psychological material is just stuff, raw material, out of which the artist, or artists in this case, construct a work of art. Those other things, color, sound, form, cuteness, they too are stuff. The purpose of this post is to begin thinking about how all this stuff works together to create a work of cinematic art. As for what that work means, I don’t know and I don’t care. Not here and now. What matters is how it works.

Cuteness and the Audience Disney’s infamous cuteness is lavished on this episode. I’d like to suggest that Disney uses it for the same reason it has been adopted by the Japanese in manga and anime. Here’s what I said about it in a review of an exhibition at New York’s Japan Society a few years ago (Godzilla’s Children: Murakami Takes Manhattan, Mecademia 2, pp. 283-287): This play on cuteness, in particular the emphasis on large heads with large eyes, evokes the stylistic feature that is most remarked by newcomers to otaku culture. Males as well as females, adults and young adults as well as infants and children, all are depicted with these kawaii overtones in a large range of manga and anime titles, many with large adult audiences. Is this an assertion of the infantile nature of the Japanese psyche? I do not think so. This stylization reminds me of what ethologist Konrad Lorenz called the infant schema [which I’m taking from chapter 31 of Wolfgang Wickler’s The Sexual Code]. Lorenz observed that, in a wide variety of animal species (reptile, bird, mammal), infants have rounder faces than adults, with less prominent noses, relatively larger eyes, and rounder cheeks. This morphology has a signal function; it is meant to elicit certain kinds of behavior from conspecifics. There is, one infers, some circuit in the brain that is sensitive to this morphology and that biases behavior in emotionally positive ways. Page 48

Disney’s Pastoral Symphony Taking this at face value we can ask: why is much manga and anime designed to activate these particular circuits? Whatever the artists think they are doing, the effect is to license, to legitimize, non-standard behavior enacted by these characters. The infant schema evokes care-giving attitudes in the audience. In reality, infants are given license to do all sorts of things forbidden to older children, much less to adults. In manga and anime, teens and even adults are given such license; those high foreheads, diminished noses, and big eyes signal the readers and audience: “Cut me some slack, I’m experimenting, trying new things. Care for me. Care about me.” This is most obvious in the case of those magical girls who utter a magic phrase and, in a dazzle of pixie dust, don magical garb and wield superpowers.

I suggest that the same considerations apply to Disney, and that despite the fact that he hadn’t particularly identified children as his audience at this time. Or perhaps, this argument is particularly important because Disney was not making films expressly for children, not in 1941, when Fantasia premiered. He was certainly aware that children watched his cartoons—the only films he made until after WWII—and marketed franchised goods to them. But he was making films for the general film audience, adults and children alike. It’s in THAT context that we have to interpret all the cuteness. My remarks about cuteness in manga and anime amount to saying that cuteness is a distancing device that allows greater acceptance of whatever the characters are doing. We treat their actions as play and we accept those because we’re unconsciously treating and indulging them as children. But that also distances us from their actions. We don’t have to imagine ourselves doing such things because, hey! we’re adults and they’re not. They’re some other kind of creature, not like us at all.

Follow the Cuteness The first moving creatures we see are young unicorns romping across a field, and red, white, and blue unicorns at that:

Then the fauns and the flying horses, with all the business about the young ones playing in the water. The adult horses are not cute, of course, they’re majestic. In the second segment the cuteness is supplied by the cherubs, who are all flesh-colored, unlike the young unicorns or flying horses. The centaurs are not cute; the centaurettes are, but more in as adolescents than as children. Cuteness becomes peculiar in the Bacchanal. The fauns are cute, and they disappear at the mid-point. The unicorn-donkey is certainly cute, but his tipsiness puts something of a damper on that, as we see in his cross-eyed close-up in the central shot. And then there’s Bacchus. Just what is he? Is he really cute? Perhaps. He’s certainly round and when, after the vat burst, he splashes around in the spilt wine, actions we associate Page 49


with infants and young children. Perhaps he was intended to be cute, but he doesn’t quite pull it off; his baldness is that of an old man, and old men can’t be cute. Once Zeus and Vulcan appear we see that he’s definitely not like them, but he’s not like the centaurs either, to the extent that one can compare them. He’s ambiguous. That bacchanal he presides over is dangerous. Given that Disney and his team had to make this story up, we can only assume they made it up to suit their purposes. They surely knew where such drunken revelry led, where it was intended to lead. And they can’t go there. Even if Disney had presented these actions as those of ordinary human adults, he’s at the end of the representational line. He simply can’t depict either an orgy or private sex off in the bushes or in private rooms somewhere in the Elysian Palace Love Hotel. In any event, he doesn’t have to depict those actions. The adults in his audience who want to imagine sexual activity are free to do so; those who don’t, won’t even be tempted. As for the children, what they see is this funny old man playing around with this funny donkey with the unicorn horn. Still, if he can’t represent sexual activity (remember the closed curtain at the end of the previous segment?), he’s still got to finish out his episode with more material. What to do? What he does, as we’ve seen, is stage a storm, with Zeus and Vulcan in the middle of it. They’re not cute at all. But they’re not vicious. There’s something almost playful about their activities:

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When he’s had his fun, Zeus gives a yawn and goes to sleep. The storm is over. During the storm all the cuteness went into hiding, for example:

But when it’s over, all the cuteness comes out to play in the final segment. We now see Bacchus and his donkey-unicorn again being playful, but in a different mood, and we see the cherubs and the young horses fly and swim about. In particular, we see that the young flying horse who took his first hesitant steps in the morning (say, twenty minutes ago in the film) is now confident in his abilities. While we could ask, “how’d he get that way?” that’s the wrong question, as I indicated in the post on oral imagery. Disney gives us no explanation at all. All that matters is that WE see that mastery. Like everything else, including the cuteness, it is there for its effects on us. The Pastoral episode, like every episode in Fantasia, like all Page 51


films, like all art, is created to have certain effects in the audience. Disney’s put us through an experience. What’s the arc of that experience?

Apollonian and Dionysian Let’s go back to the middle segment, the Bacchanal, and to Bacchus. Bacchus is presented as both an old man and an infant—both of which are bald. He’s also presented as a lecherous man, going after all those centaurettes whom we’d just seen pair off with centaurs. Moreover, he’s sharing wine, not only with an animal, but an animal unlike any other in this world, a unicorndonkey. It’s all just a bit unseemly, not simply because of the implied sexuality, but simply because it makes nonsense of the social world. Bacchus and his steed violate the system of social categories on which that social world is based, the categories that dictate expected actions. And THAT, in effect, is why Zeus and Vulcan, both unambiguously male, take up arms against him, him and his wine. When the wine is destroyed and the revelry dispersed, order can return, order based on a clarification of categories. That clarification happens during the storm. As the storm breaks the various creatures go into protective mode. A centaur protectively leads a centaurette to shelter—it’s the couple brought together by the cherubs—thus affirming a proper relationship between a man and a woman, unlike the improper relationships that Bacchus sought from those centaurettes young enough to be his daughter. A mother unicorn protects her children and a flying-mare rescues one of hers. Again, these are proper relationships between parents and children. At the same time they also properly reflect a social hierarchy, parents over children and, in the case of the centaur and centaurette, male over female, which is surely how Disney and his audience thought of it, if not how we think of these matters today. Does this logic imply that, when a centaurette rescues a young unicorn, that centaurs and hierarchically superior to unicorns in the social system of this world? I think it does. By the same token, it’s hard to see that Bacchus makes any particular effort to protect his unicorn-donkey. They flee from Zeus’s thunderbolts together. At one point we see Bacchus pulling his companion; lightening strikes and their positions are reversed; and, after being blown about by the wind, they race to the vat together, but untethered.

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Given their odd position in the hierarchy—Bacchus as god at the top, as infant near the bottom; donkey-unicorn as ambiguous—that makes sense. And, of course, the lightening is directed at them, though in the end it’s the wine that’s destroyed, not Bacchus. This is, after all, a comedy. What of the cherubs? As we saw above, they hide. But they do that of their own accord. No one helps them to their hiding place. And just what is THAT hiding place? It’s a temple, the one temple we’ve seen at various times in the episode. No creature is explicitly above them in the hierarchy, but, in the temple, they are effectively under the protection of the gods. When the storm’s over, we see them on the roof of that temple playing in a water puddle that reflects the rainbow:

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The storm has prompted the creatures to affirm their proper places in society. That reverses the descent into drunken chaos threatened by the bacchanal. Not only does the sun come out but we see Apollo driving his chariot and waving to the Elysian creatures.

But it’s Diana and her deer who presides over the final moments of the episode:

At this point we should recall that the Greek correlate to Bacchus is Dionysus, and that Friedrich Nietzsche created a theory of art around and opposition between “the Apollonian art of sculpture, and the nonimagistic, Dionysian art of music,” asking us to “first conceive of them as the separate art worlds of dreams and intoxication” (The Birth of Tragedy). Disney has given us intoxication in the bacchanal and dream, well, the whole episode, the whole film, is a dream. Page 54


Now, by invoking Nietzsche I do not mean to imply that either Disney or anyone on his staff had read Nietzsche and deliberately brought him to the table for this episode. We don’t need to suppose any such thing. Nietzsche didn’t conjure his theory out of thin air. He conjured it out of his knowledge and experience of art. To the extent that art is as Nietzsche theorized, it’s not the least bit surprising that Disney and his team should produce their own mythological invocation of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. After all, they’re working in a medium that combines the Dionysian abandon of music with the differentiating clarity of vision.

Roman Jakobson and Structuralist Poetics And that brings us to a last line of argument, one based on the classical structuralist thinking of the great Roman Jakobson. Jakobson was a linguist, one of the greatest of the previous century. In 1960 he attended a multidisciplinary conference on linguistic style at which he gave a closing address, Linguistics and Poetics, that has become one of the classic statements of structuralist thinking about language. In this address he outlined six functions of language: referential, phatic, conative, emotive, metalingual, and poetic. He pointed out that, while any given ‘chunk’ of language could involve several of the functions, one is likely to predominate. In the case of poetry the poetic function dominates. It is to Jakobson’s poetic function that I want to turn. To be sure, we’re not dealing with poetry, we’re dealing with film. But Jakobson stated his functions is such abstract terms that we can apply them to other media. Jakobson’s first characterization of the poetic function goes like this: “The set (Einstellung) toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language. . . . This function, by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.” [Thomas Sebeok, ed. Style in Language, 1960, p. 356.] “The set toward the MESSAGE,” we’ve already looked at that in the post, Color and Sound. The very fact that the palette is so bright and saturated, and the colors so often atypical, draws our attention to the color itself, not to mention the Art Deco styling that draws our attention to forms. Color is further emphasized by the prominence of the rainbow in the last segment. Similarly, the moments where an onscreen character, a faun or a centaur, plays an instrument that picks up a musical line in the soundtrack, those moments call our attention to the music itself. When, in the bacchanal, a faun blows grape juice through his pipes, the music-making is linked to the oral imagery:

And when, at the end, Bacchus drinks rainbow-tinted water from the cup that had formerly held wine, the visual element is now linked to oral imagery:

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Thus, by implication, the sight and sound are now linked within the episode itself and not simply in physical composition of film. A bit later in his essay Jakobson offers another formulation of the poetic principle where he talks of selection and combination in linguistic process (p. 358): If “child” is the topic of the message, the speaker selects one among the extant, more or less similar, nouns like child, kid, youngster, tot, all of them equivalent in a certain respect, and then, to comment on this topic, he may select one of the semantically cognate verbs—sleeps, dozes, nods, naps. Both chosen words combine in the speech chain. The selection is produced on the base of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymity and antonymity, while the combination, the build up of the sequence, is based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence.

We’ve seen this at work too, most critically in the Bacchanal where the unicorn-donkey is substituted for a centaurette in Bacchus’s succession of dance partners. The unicorn-donkey and the centaurette are equated to one another because they play the same combinatorial role in an activity, the dance (and subsequent kiss). And this is how music, grape juice, wine, and rainbow have been equated in those two shots we just examined. Music and grape juice are equated in the first shot—both come out of the pipes—and wine and the rainbow are equated in the second shot—Bacchus drinks both from the same cup.

A Final Word For all that happens in this episode, it doesn’t really tell a story. It doesn’t have a plot. It is a collection of vignettes illustrating activities from everyday life. The drama lies not in the fortunes of this or that character, but the order itself, and the threat to that order posed by drunken revelry. And yet, at the very end, when Disney has Bacchus drink the rainbow water, he associates the film’s artistry, his own artistry, with that revelry. There is, of course, nothing more conventional than the association of artists with drunken revelry and such. That’s been a common place at least since the Romantic cult of artistic genius. Such associations would have been particularly problematic for Disney as he was anxious to present his work as more wholesome than the usual Hollywood fare, a point Nicholas Sammond makes in Babes in Tomorrowland. I thus can’t but help seeing an echo of his 1934 “The Grasshopper and the Ants.” As you know the grasshopper spends his summer singing and having fun while the ants industriously

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pile up food. When the winter comes along the ants have plenty of food but the grasshopper has none, and the ants allow him to starve. Disney is nothing if not in favor or industry and hard work. That’s certainly what he did and it’s what his audience valued. But Disney worked hard at producing entertainment, grasshopper stuff. And so, in his retelling of Aesop’s fable, the ant agree to take the grasshopper in and feed him, on one condition: that he make music for them. His treatment of Bacchus, and his unicorn-donkey, seems to be a more elaborate version of the same compromise.

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