An Optical Poem

After years of favoriting this on YouTube, I finally watched this M-G-M/Oskar Fischinger colored paper-animated short there. Done to the music of Franz Liszt's "Second Hungarian Rhapsody" (the same music Bugs Bunny would play in Rhapsody Rabbit), we see lots of circles, rectangles, and other shapes in space moving and appearing/disappearing to that music. Quite fascinating to watch and maybe it may have been the inspiration for Walt Disney's later feature length Fantasia a few years later. This seemed to be Fischinger's only film work for a major studio. It certainly seemed possibly too avant garde for the tastes of the public of the time! How many even know about this one? Anyway, that's a recommendation for An Optical Poem.

What makes me chuckle about this short film is that MGM actually financed it! Who'd have thought that such attitudes were ever present at the big studios? The intertitle at the start calls the movie a "scientific experiment"*, gawd those guys were dumb. Anyway they let Fischinger get on with his business so I can't complain. The second time I watched it I really was dumbfounded by the MGM logo, for once, ars gratia artis actually meant something! Anyway the film is a visual accompaniment to Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody no.2. Fischinger chose his music really well because there are lots of sea changes within the piece that allows him to do something totally different at the mood switches. He uses coloured paper circles and stop motion animation, to create a geometrical ballet. He must have done a lot of work because the movements are all very smooth. In fact it's really a masterpiece of technical craft and almost unbelievable how synchronised the animation is to the music.

It brought a big smile to my face and that's really rare.

* "To most of us, music suggests definite mental images of form and colour. The picture you are about to see is a novel scientific experiment. Its object is to convey these mental images in visual form"

I appreciated the soundtrack more than the abstract art, patterns of balloon-shaped dots that dance across the screen for six minutes while the 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody explodes with musical sounds.

After a few minutes, the short becomes too repetitious to be really novel. In fact, it's the sort of thing the Disney studio was already experimenting with and led to several short subjects, as well as the full-length feature "Fantasia" later on, combining classical music with unique animation.

But this was 1937 and the comparison to Disney was not made at the time. Nevertheless, I found it monotonous to watch and not unique enough, except for the exhilarating classical music performed.

Optical Poem, An (1937)

*** (out of 4)

This 6-minute animated short is considered by many to have been the inspiration for Disney's FANTASIA. This film contains various animated images being played to Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 and makes for quite a ride. In his day, director Fischinger was pretty much overlooked and after during down a job offer from Disney, he would eventually be fired by both MGM and Paramount. His animation career never took off in the movies but years later his work began to be reevaluated and today's he's considered one of the best. This, considered his best film, is pretty strong in terms of its visual style even though it's rather simple. A blue background with various circles, squares and other images. The film moves along quite well, although the six-minutes do start to get a bit long towards the end.

It's an MGM animated short with Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Franz Liszt playing. It's Technicolor. It's all bright colors and geometric shapes. It's a little experimental. It's interesting. Sometimes, the movement is pretty good, but other times, I want it to switch with the music tempo a lot more. One of the most compelling aspect of this piece of music is its many changes of tempo. The visuals need to match that better. This type of animated experiments have a long Hollywood history. Producer Oskar Fischinger would go on to do a sequence in Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) which obviously drew inspiration from this.