Ave Maria: It's Not About Us

It’s time to return to animation, the medium which has, in many ways, been one of my core arenas over the past few years, that and graffiti. I’ve working on Fantasia for the last several years, starting with an appreciation of the film as a whole, and then writing pieces on specific segments. I’ve got two more to go, Night on Bald Mountain and the Pastoral Symphony, plus the intermission interlude, including the sound-track. I’ve already discussed the Ave Maria sequence with Mike Barrier.

The Ave Maria segment, the last one in Disney's Fantasia, must be one of the most restrained animation sequences ever produced. There are segments where nothing, or almost nothing, moves for a second or three. And this is not limited animation Hanna-Barbara style or anime style, where motion is minimized to save money, though money was an issue, as always.

There are two sources of movement in films: 1) movement produced by the camera, and 2) movements of objects in front of the camera. This segment runs for almost six minutes, half of which have no moving objects on screen. The IS motion, but it’s produced by the camera, and that is often minimal.

It’s an astonishing conception, especially since it follows Night on Bald Mountain, which is perhaps the most frenetic of the segments. And that, in part is the point. The two were planned to contrast the sacred (Ave Maria) with the secular (Bald Mountain). Disney has mirrored, amplified, and transformed this thematic contrast by an almost whole-scale contrast in formal and technical means.

Maximal Minimalism

This is maximal animation, as maximal as there’s ever been. And the visible restraint, in fact, required extreme technical effort, as John Culhane details in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. A special camera rig had to be built to film the last scene in the segment, a long zoom from deep in the forest to a sunrise. The rig spanned a sound-stage that was 45 feet wide. And that last segment had to be shot three times, each time taking several days. The wrong lens had been in the camera during the first shoot. The second shoot was interrupted by an earthquake which may have misaligned the equipment. The only way to tell would have been to develop the film and see how it looked. If it looked bad, it would have been too late to re-shoot it and make the premier date. So they started over again, from the beginning of the segment.

The segment's ONLY foreground movement comes from the procession of religious—whether they’re supposed to be pilgrims, nuns, or priests is not at all clear, nor does it matter—that occurs in the first half of the sequence. They are relatively small on the screen, and that caused a problem. It’s a matter of precision (Culhane, p. 200):

In animation, the slower the movement, the more drawings there are, and the closer together each successive drawing of the same figure is. “So close was this animation,” Gershman wrote, “that the difference in the width of pencil lines was more than enough to cause ‘jitters,’ not only to the animation, but to everyone connected with the sequence. (Jitters, also called “strobing,” occur when the successive images of a progressive movement are not fused by the persistence of vision, but appear to move as a series of short, staccato jumps—in short, to jitter.)

In a review on 2 August 1940 the procession jittered so badly that Disney ordered it be redone (Culhane, pp. 200-201)

As I said, maximal minimalism. Why? Let’s look at the sequence.

The Procession

As Night on Bald Mountain comes to an end, the Ave Maria music is soft, slow, and meditative. The demon, Chernobog, metamorphoses back into the mountain top, mists appear and the camera zooms out and down from Bald Mountain, where it then stops and holds position. [The segment starts at about 1:58:20 and the camera holds at about 1:58:43. Timings are from the Fantasia & Fantasia 2000 Special Edition.]

The pilgrims then come into view at the bottom, the mist thins out a bit, and we see the pilgrims moving slowly from left to right across the screen. Their lights shimmer across the screen and the procession is reflected in a body of water at the bottom of the screen. Thus we have a parallel lines of motion that are symmetrical about a horizontal axis.

It is almost as though Disney were deliberately analyzing the field of view into ‘orthogonal’ elements in such a way that we focus on them independently, one after the other. First, camera zooming out from the scene. Then that stops and movement within the scene begins. We follow it in parallel motion, which seems enormously important to me, though I don’t quite know why.

It’s a purely formal pattern. The pilgrims DO have a different aspect than their reflections, as those reflections ripple on the surface of the moving waters. Yet this very parallelism seems to reduce the ontological difference between moving people and reflections of moving people. On the screen each is but a moving pattern of lights and forms. The fact that the pilgrims do nothing but move slowly and in a stately fashion allows this ontological flattening. If they were moving somewhat irregularly and independently of one another, much less talking and gesturing back and forth, that would create a dynamism within the group that would render the reflected movements clearly inferior. As it is, the two parallel movements have equal ontological weight, though slightly different sensory qualities.

Disney’s minimalism is thus revealing itself to be a powerful meditative statement that places humans within the world, but does not assign them any privilege within that world. We do not dominate this world, it does not exist for us. It merely exists, as do we. If you will, Disney’s visual minimalism is a reflex of the world’s plenitude.

Once the procession’s movement is firmly established the camera again begins to zoom out. The individual pilgrims become smaller as the vectors of their parallel movements, that is the movement of the pilgrims and of their reflections, become more salient. The choral voices come up on the sound track and Disney gives us a bit of fancy editing, a cross-dissolve [at roughly at 1:59:18]. In a cross-dissolve the disappearance of one sequence overlaps with the emergence of another. In this case the dissolve just moves a bit further along on the pilgrims’ procession, to a steeply arched bridge over a body of water. The parallel movement itself is uninterrupted, though it is momentarily made more complicated.

At the bridge the reflections become more clearly defined and visible than their originals. The bridge itself is supported by three gothic arches, thus giving it a strong liturgical resonance. Now we see a definite pattern of ripples fanning out from the bridge and modulating the reflections, given them more life than their originals.

The camera begins to zoom out and pans right. There’s another cross-dissolve at roughly 1:59:40; this moves us away from the bridge and heads us into a forest. The vocals start with choral singing.

The religious move off to the right and become smaller. Now motion parallax becomes important as trees slide past one another in different ‘layers’ as the virtual camera pivots to follow the pilgrims. This is done slowly and deliberately so that it is easy to follow. In fact, one has almost no choice but to follow it, as very little else is happening. If the camera is a proxy for our mind, then that’s what Uncle Walt is doing, making us mindful of our mind.

Very Buddhist, no? Not very hick from Kanssa, is it? That Disney, slier than even he knew, and he no doubt thought himself very clever indeed.

The pilgrims disappear behind a hill for a moment, and then reappear, now increasing in size until they are larger, and thus closer to us, than before—though they’re still relatively small and distant. Motion parallax among the trees continues. Notice also that the trees closest to us are blurred, as should be the case as the virtual camera is focused, not on them, but on the procession.

The procession goes into the forest at approximately 2:00:29. A ruin goes by in the foreground at about 2:00:49. We then have another cross-dissolve that moves us from the ruin to a lakeside: 2:00:59. Notice how the tree branches give the appearance of gothic arches. Notice also the reflections of the trees in the lake as well as those of the pilgrims, an elaboration of the earlier image.

The camera continues panning to right as pilgrims move rightward as well. In fact it is not clear to me that (images of) the pilgrims are actually moving horizontally. I infer that they must be moving so because I know that they’re walking and they’re facing to the right. But camera motion appears faster than the walking. The only actual movement of the pilgrims appears to be a slight oscillation back and forth, corresponding to foot falls and the attendant shifts in posture.

The forest fades to black and camera zooms in and up over the procession until we have an entirely black screen (2:01:42). At this point, of course, we have no idea where we are. Just some place deep in the forest. As the screen is black, camera motion has no meaning. We are in visual limbo, perhaps for the first time in the entire film.

We are. Just there.

Then a solo voice enters at 2:01:49. Still there’s nothing to see, but at least the voice is something. It defines a position in auditory space—which would have been meaningful at the first screenings, as the sound-track was recorded in a precursor to stereo.

At 2:01:52 a shaft of light appears to the upper right of center. Now we can orient ourselves. And now we can identify camera motion. We are moving.

Have we become one of the pilgrims? Is that why they are no more visible; we’ve joined their procession at the head? One could, of course, read the film in that way, but it isn’t necessary.

Still, we are left with a question: what’s the significance of the fact that the pilgrims are gone? While they are on screen they were the focal point of our attention and we could contemplate the relationship between them, our surrogates, and the world. Now that they are gone, there is no such focal point and so no way to contemplate the relationship between humans and the world.

There is only the world. Could Uncle Walt actually showing us: It’s not about us?

In a few seconds (by, say, 2:01:55) it becomes apparent that we’re zooming in. That zoom continues through to the end of the episode and, thus, the end of the film.

By 2:02:38 it becomes apparent that we’re emerging from the forest. That is, that the camera is doing so. The camera, of course, is our eyes. The structure of branches has the aspect of a gothic cathedral, as it did before. The motion parallax and foreground blur continues our way through the forest:

Finally we emerge from the forest to the rising sun:

We see its rays, highly conventionalized as is this whole segment, but not the sun itself.

It’s Not About Us

We’ve seen gothic arches before in Fantasia, in the opening segment, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor:

Their reappearance here must, then, surely resonate back to the beginning. And the confluence of the beginning and the end is but a trope for eternity, a limitless time outside time.

Furthermore, that opening segment is set in a world without a world. That is to say, there is no clearly defined 3D space in which one finds 3D objects. There are apparent 3D objects there, and 1D and 2D as well. There is some order as well, but the logic of that order is not apparent.

And it’s to that world before the world that Uncle Walt visually links us in this, this what? If that was before the world, is this after it?

Whatever it is, it is, indeed, not about us. There are, of course, many episodes in Fantasia where there are no humans. By the strictest accounting we appear only in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and in this one, Ave Maria. The gods in Pastoral Symphony, of course, have human form; and the upper bodies of the centaurs are human as well. How do we score the animals in Dance of the Hours? They ARE animals, but they’re dancing the ballet, often in human-form costumes. What of the fairies in Nutcracker Suite? What of the first half of Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, where we see shadows of (real, not animated) humans? Even if we count all these quasi-humans as humans, that leaves the Rite of Spring utterly lacking in humans.

And you can’t assert It’s Not About Us if there are no humans at all. That assertion is meaningless if there are no humans. There needs to be an US if there is to be something that’s NOT ABOUT US.

That’s what Disney’s doing, explicitly, in the Ave Maria segment. The pilgrims establish a human presence in the world, but that’s all that they do. They aren’t interacting with one another in any visible way; they aren’t oriented toward mundane concerns at all. They’re just there, moving along the path, a path with no visible destination. It’s just a journey.

And then they disappear. Yet the movement, and thus the journey, continues. Thus has Disney reached back to the beginning, swallowed the whole film into one (the work, I conjecture, of the previous segment, Night on Bald Mountain) and pulled it up after.

As the film ends, yes, it’s not about us.

And, yes, we’re here.