The Rite of Spring is a ballet and orchestral concert work by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Sergei. It is the fourth and longest segment in Fantasia, focusing on the Big Bang and the Dinosaur Age. The score starts with outer space and goes back to 4.5 billion years ago, where we see the Milky Way Galaxy coming out of the darkness, comets, the sun, and shooting stars whiz by. We then come down to Earth being born and exploding.
Leopold Stokowski, “Fantasia’s” conductor, advised cutting “The Rite of Spring” to less than 20 minutes, but Disney used 30, nearly the full length. In the “Rite of Spring” segment, several dinosaurs perish in the desert, likely becoming fossilized for future paleontologists to uncover. This scene is considered one of my favorite dinosaur films, and it continues to be a favorite among fans of Walt Disney’s magnum opus, Fantasia.
The Rite of Spring is the fourth and longest segment in Fantasia, mainly focusing on the Big Bang and the Dinosaur age. While some critics criticized Stravinsky’s score, Walt Disney’s dinosaurs finally did the music justice. The Rite of Spring was lauded by jazz musicians, inspired countless film scores, and made Disney dinosaurs dance.
In conclusion, the Rite of Spring is a significant piece of music that has been used in various Disney movies and TV series, including Fantasia.
📹 Episode 10: The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky
It doesn’t get more radical than this – Igor Stravinsky’s groundbreaking ballet and the story of that “Riot at the Rite”!
📹 The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky) – Fantasia
Excerpt from Fantasia featuring The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky.
I don’t care about whether Stravinsky thought this did justice to his piece or not; I think this is a viscerally spectacular and ingenious marriage. Stravinsky’s score set to the age of the dinosaurs is an genius move if there ever was one. The whole sequence is arguably one of my favorites in FANTASIA, period.
i know these dinosaurs are very very inaccurate but that doesn’t mean i can’t enjoy them, this was made in 1940 and at the time people still thought dinosaurs were tail dragging lizards. i do still like modern anatomically accurate dinosaurs more but i still really like these retro ones, they are still awesome. this entire segment is by far my favorite part of the movie and i do wish kids movies still had the guts to be disturbing and scary. and it seems like parents now complain if a movie has even one dark or sad moment. I don’t know if audiences can no longer handle dark things or if the movie makers just think they cant but its one of the reasons i don’t really like modern kids movies. i will take this segment of fantasia over frozen or tangled anyday
Fun fact! If you get more emotional (sad, afraid, ect.) at this scene more than other similar animation, it’s because Rite of Spring’s music is incredibly dissonant! Receptor’s in your brain know that something’s wrong, doesn’t know what to make of it, and makes your whole brain freak out! If a piece of music is dissonant, that means it doesn’t match a key, is off tempo from itself, is discordant, or is just wrong in some way. Look up dissonant music if you want to see a clearer example of this!
Most children’s movies these days are outclassed by “old” children’s films/musicals such as Fantasia. I used to watch Fantasia all the time as a kid (and still have the cassette of this). The blend of dynamic classical music with equally dramatic and dynamic imagery is a pure work of art — and if Fantasia were created today, it’d most likely be banned for children due to this scene’s “violent nature”. We over-protect children these days by stunting their imaginations.
This also reminds me of the train ride at Disneyland back in the day. Don’t know if they still have it. But there was the train ride or tram ride and it would go through all the parks and they would have this huge diorama where they would show the Grand canyon in modern times with Rams and mountain lions and coyotes and this beautiful snow scene and it was playing this really nice music and it was very relaxing. And then if you listen to the voice telling the story it takes you to before and it shows these dinosaurs fighting and growling and trying to eat one another over a volcano that has exploded with the lava flowing it just reminds me of this. I always felt bad for the dinosaurs that got killed when I was little.
This is so much better than the digitally restored version. In this, the heavy shadows work better to fit the tone of the scene; you see the Tyrannosaurus’s body is almost completely darkened out, and the main thing that is visible are the his red eyes and teeth. In the updated version, you can not only see his body color but also the lines drawn across his body. In my opinion, they draw the attention away from the red eye, and come off as more distracting. And overall, it lessens the animal’s frightening appearance.
Normally some would think the segment of Night on Bald Mountain would be scary and it’s understandable, but for me The Rite Of Spring scared the hell out of me since I was little and it still does. If you ask why do I keep perusal it? I admire both the majestic music and early animation in this segment.
Disney should’ve made a couple of dinosaur themed movies during the “animation done by hand” phase of animation, they did a pretty good job with the dinosaurs in Fantasia. Sure, there’s inaccuracies with some of the dinosaurs but remember, when this film was made and shown, it was 1940/1941 so naturally, in between then and now, we’d find out things about dinosaurs that they didn’t know about in 1940.
I first saw this segment not as part of Fantasia, but as a 16mm film in elementary school. Disney released the Rite of Spring segment as a short film with narration dubbed over it and titled it “A World Is Born.” It was a little bit of a stretch to me when I did see Fantasia in its entirety (at ten) and saw this segment WITHOUT the narration.
“Fantasia”, along with “Robin Hood”, has always been the only Disney movie I’ve ever actually liked. This scene with prehistoric cataclisms happening and dinos tearing apart one each other on the notes of Stravinsky’s “Sacre” is an absolute masterwork, expecially in being able to carefully presenting people of all age a crude, harsh reality in a tactful, yet sincere way (the scene has been animated under the guide of Wolfgang Reithermann, which later also directed “Robin Hood” – In this sense, there’s a link between the two works!) I don’t even actually count “Fantasia” as simply a movie, to me it trascends it to become an essay about what can be done with animation. Definitely an absolute masterwork.
This segment is so intense it’s all thanks to Wolfgang “woolie” Reitherman the supervising animator for this fight scene. Woolie Reitherman always loved action scenes in the Disney films he animated • Monstro the whale in “Pinocchio” • the dog fight in “Lady and the Tramp” • the crocodile in “Peter Pan” and he directed the prince slaying the dragon in “Sleeping Beauty”.
@Amanda Lennert I wouldn’t call it a kids movie. Fantasia uses animation on a much more artistic view than most other disney films that use it for comedy. It is a mixture of colors, animation and live footage beautifully blended with the music and give a unique feeling. Most kids perusal Fantasia will wonder where are Mickey and Donald and get bored by the animation. This was my reaction when I first watched it as a 10 y-old, but now I see it’s splendid animation and mixage as a true work of art. Well, this is what I think anyway.
Haha bless, don’t know how young I was but when my mum thought it was okay for us finally watch Jaws- we were near the head popping out of the boat scene and my mum was behind me and she just remembered how frightening that scene was so she quickly covered my eyes except she forgot to let go of the remote as she slammed it into the bridge of my nose hehe gotta give mums credit for their concern haha
This and the Night on Bald Mountain have always been my favorite parts in the movie. Even when I was a little girl I thought they were awesome. It never scared me. However the “walking stone tooth” thing in the first song scared the hell out of me. Anyone who has seen this great movie should know what I’m talking about lol.
For some reason, I always thought of the Stegasourus (if that’s what the dinosaur with the spiky tail was called), as of she. Now I’ve just realised that this was actually pretty much my first experience of brute masculine force 🙁 either way, this part always scared me. Along with the world formation and the extinction
Not necessarily. Although an Allosaurus would have made more sense with the fauna in the sequence, it really was intended to be a Tyrannosaurus. I’m not sure if Disney knew about the 80-million-year separation between them, but it was common belief back then that T. rex had three fingers. (Complete skeletons hadn’t been found yet, so assumptions were made based off of other species which, indeed, had three fingers.) Even after the arms were found, he said people wouldn’t want a two-clawed rex.
Why is everybody all mad about how the T-Rex is done wrong? Was it even advertised as a T-Rex? Did the dinosaurs say “Oh no! A T-Rex!” did the announcer in the orchestra say it was a T-Rex? Sure maybe the Disney artists thought it was and meant it to be, but no one said anything… so let’s just call it however it looks and enjoy the animation! 😀
@ThePeregrinestar Good ol’ Walt that he was actually decided to draw the T. Rex with three fingers instead, stating ‘It looked better that way’. Hey why argue it wasn’t incredibly accurate anyway it was the spectacle of illustrating the music more than most other things. And me too! Being a lover of all things Dinosaurs, I used to rewind the Rite of Spring section over and over again, sharing feelings of fear but awe with this scene. Even today I hold it as so influential to me.
Everyone talks about T. Rex’s wrong posture. But no one talks about how he has six fingers. Even by then, they knew that was wrong. Same with having dinosaurs form millions of years apart together. I know it’s been said before, but it’s still too much fun to point out: humans and T. Rex lived 60 million years apart, Stegosaurus and T. Rex lived 83 million years apart. Might as well just give up and stick in some cave men and robots. Aww, but I’m being a bitch now. Seriously, this was an epic segment and a masterpiece of a movie. This and Night on Bald Mountain. Science can usually take a break when it comes to dinosaurs in cartoons. Still can’t get over how they made T. Rex look, though.
The VHS-contrast makes me so nostalgic, and I actually kind of prefer it more than it’s Blu-Ray update. Sure, the Blu-Ray version has way clearer details, but that’s also something that took away from the intensity of this scene. Here, the T-Rex practically looks like some sort of Hellspawn, and you can actually make out the pure bloodthirst in it’s eyes and expressions, whereas in the newer edits, it’s eyes and mouth are just too darkened, and it’s skin looks too light-grey.
We have to remember, there is no true good or bad in nature. It makes no favourites of one over the other. There is only survival, when one must often take life in order to give it. For a predator as mighty as that ending the life of its prey is no better or worse than that prey that ate a living think that grew from the same life giving soils, as long as it’s done in a way that benefits both sides. Nature can only ensure that there is only balance in its powers, and so for us as living beings, we must not choose the illusion between good or evil, between the things we find peaceful and those we find fearful. Instead, we must accept and respect all living things as they are and what they are meant to do, for it is the way of life, always has, and always will.
Everything Disney did before was gamble when he did movies like this, it was a lost for them. So nowdays the company owners is more for things that can earn commercial money for them as so low price as possible and to be cheep safe they think that keeping to modern standard humor like in Funniest Home article they are sadly not gonna get a guy to make a really beautiful art of movie like this one soon. I hope they will start making movies, 2D, 3D, live action anything that can be good.
Ummm, why is it that both with this and the Firebird from fantasia 2000 they removed… basically all the Stravinsky. The music shown here I could expect from the 5th movement of Symphonie Fantasique, not Stravinsky. I think that we are too afraid to show children music by composers like Schoenberg or Stravinksy. Just sad really.
THIS wa the scariest part when I watched it as a kid. I still can’t watch it, i’m not joking!! It’s not just scary.. i can’t describe it, it’s like looking terror in the eyes. OMG I remember the feeling I got each time I was perusal it when the heads of all the dinosaurs turned quickly and there was the T-REX. ta-dah!! *shits pants*
It’s really weird, because I remember perusal this when I was like, 3, and I wasn’t phased by it at all. I understood that the Stegosaurus died, but I was like, “Oh, dinosaur go bye-bye nao :3” or something. It’s weird how my toddler mind could tolerate stuff like this. No wonder I’m so dark… o_O
Call me weird, but seeing stuff like this and other dinosaur films when I was little somehow convinced me that the T-Rex was a vicious killer that did nothing but kill and eat other dinosaurs. When I got older, the idea of T-Rex’s breeding and caring for offspring seemed strange to me. I blame the b-movies of the old days.
This fight isn’t accurate, Stegosaurs and Trex didn’t live at the same period of time, and anyway, one hit of a Stegosaurs could totaly kill a Trex. But we can’t really know the truth about those spikes, if evolution allowed them to grow so much it means some dinosaurs could survive against them before.
Even as a kid i didnt know who to root for..the Rex or the Stego…but then it hit me…Rexes didnt have 3 fingers..Allosaurus? Nope..its a Rex..the animator used 3 fingers because he thought it was more Scary. However…Allosaurus Fits more fighting Stego because they both were in the Jurassic Period, and the fingers….and I better slow down before I go Dino Nerd on a Disney article I wanted to re-see after all this time XD