24 Frames: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (Fantasia, Samuel Armstrong, 1940)

“You will be able to SEE the music and HEAR the picture,” said Walt Disney of his hopes for Fantasia; and you can read, in excerpts from the transcripts of their story meetings, how Disney and Stokowski and their associates worked toward achieving that aim. In a story meeting on the Toccata and Fugue held on Tuesday afternoon, November 8, 1938, John McLeish, a story artist with the manner of John Barrymore (his stentorian tones can be heard narrating the opening of Dumbo), began talking about the contrast between the screen and the music.” In the Fugue, suggested McLeish, why not “picture a huge form moving slowly against a counterpoint in the music? Or just the opposite, when you have a slow, heavy chord, picture little, light forms playing against that.”