Oskar Fischinger’s only successful collaboration with a Hollywood studio was this 7-minute animation made for MGM in 1937. As with some of Fischinger’s earlier films, a piece of classical music is illustrated with dancing shapes of cut-out paper. The music in this instance is Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody, and this short was one of the films that brought Fischinger’s to Walt Disney’s attention when the Disney studio was planning a similarly abstract sequence for Fantasia. Fischinger worked on the Toccata and Fugue opening but his early efforts for Disney were dismissed as “too dinky” by the man responsible for a ubiquitous anthropomorphic mouse.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive