Unfortunately, while “Fantasia” was a groundbreaking achievement, it was also doomed. The idea of a series of experimental short films set to classical music was simply too much for audiences who had fallen in love with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Others found the idea of a cartoon for children engaging on equal terms with high art to be a ridiculous idea. To be fair, if you aren’t willing to take the film on its own terms, “Fantasia” is a tough sit. Scene-by-scene it can be beautiful, silly, austere, boring, terrifying and deeply racist. Dorothy Thompson, a groundbreaking journalist who had been expelled from Nazi Germany a few years before, was truly horrified by the film and what it represented. “Naziism is the abuse of power, the perverted betrayal of the instincts…and so is ‘Fantasia,'” she wrote in the pages of the New York Herald.

Today, Thompson’s take on the film seems extreme (although the racism of “Fantasia” certainly deserves that level of critique.) But the last sentence of her review is the tell: “Bravo, Toscanini!” One of the most acclaimed conductors of that time, Toscanini believed in adapting scores as carefully and literally as possible. Stokowski was beloved by the public, but in practice he was Toscanini’s polar opposite. His obituary in the New York Times features a telling quote from a man whose liberal interpretations of classical music were controversial among his fellow professionals. “That’s a piece of paper with some marking on it. We have to infuse life into it.”

While “Fantasia” was always a challenging prospect for its audience, I believe that it was Stokowski’s feature role in the production that led to the strongest critical antagonism. Music critics like Olin Downes and Virgil Thompson lambasted Stokowski’s arrangements in their reviews. Stravinsky, still living on the day “Fantasia” was released, ravaged its treatment of his “Rite of Spring.” If “Fantasia” was meant to serve as an ambassador to the world of classical music, the world of classical music wasn’t having it.