Directors: Gaetan Brizzi & Paul Brizzi
Featured Music: Igor Stravinsky (Firebird Suite - 1919 Version)
Story: Gaetan Brizzi & Paul Brizzi
Art Director: Carl Jones
Design: Gaetan Brizzi & Paul Brizzi
Sprite Lead Animator: Anthony DeRosa
Elk Lead Animator: Ron Husband
Firebird Lead Animator: John Pomeroy
Animators: Tim Allen, Sandro Cleuzo, David Hancock, Sang Jin-Kim, Gregory G. Miller, Joe Oh, David Zaboski
 

Description:

Long considered the most dramatic finale on any musical program, this powerful piece of music by Igor Stravinsky provides a truly spectacular ending to Fantasia 2000. Filmmakers Gaetan and Paul Brizzi have come up with some amazing imagery to accompany this ultimate closing number. With death and rebirth as its theme, this musical segment personifies nature in the form of a sprite who is summoned by a lone elk, the monarch of the forest. When the beauty of springtime is destroyed by the fury of the Firebird, who lives within an active volcano, it is up to the elk and sprite to once again bring life back to the ravaged forest and triumphantly reawaken what lies beneath the ashes.

Production Notes:

In searching for an appropriate piece of music to conclude Fantasia 2000, the filmmakers turned to a selection that is often considered the “ultimate finale”. According to producer Don Ernst, It has the greatest finish musically. The end of the piece is really big and works tremendously well.
Gaetan and Paul Brizzi, two internationally renowned filmmakers who have been associated with Disney’s Paris Animation Studio for the past decade, were finishing up their assignment on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, when they were approached about directing the finale for Fantasia 2000. Roy Disney had suggested Stravinksy’s The Firebird Suite and the duo started from scratch to develop a concept and artistic style for the sequence. Outstanding artists in their own right, the brothers created their own elaborate storyboards to illustrate their approach. Carl Jones served as the art director for this sequence.
According to Paul Brizzi, Tom Schumacher suggested that the piece might have something to do with nature and from there we began exploring the idea of the revival and rebirth. The music gave us all the elements we needed to tell a story with drama, excitement, joy and suspense. Images immediately came into our minds. We love the storyboarding process and it gave us a chance to communicate our vision for the piece and to work out the synch points with the music.
 

Gaëtan Brizzi adds, The Firebird is an ideal piece for Fantasia 2000 because the images lead the music and the music leads up to the images. It is a great marriage because when you hear the music you can almost see those images. Those two elements become one entity.  When we listen to classical music, we let our minds wander and we have our own images of what this music means. We wanted to respect the music.

The directors came up with three symbolic representations of nature for their central characters. The Sprite, which represents Spring, comes to life each year to renew nature and spread a blanket of greenery and fantastic colors across the landscape. A noble elk is her symbiotic partner in this annual process.

The third character is the mighty Firebird, a powerful force of nature portrayed as a volcanic lava birdlike creature that destroys everything within its path. In the end, nature springs eternal as the elk plays a key role in revitalizing the Sprite and renewing the life cycle of the forest.

We wanted the Sprite to be a character that comes once a year, explains Paul. She is the Spring and she is awakened by the elk. We wanted to explore the relationship between the two. He guides and inspires her and says its time to do her job.

She has a real innocence about her and when she goes into the volcano and awakens the Firebird spirit, she doesn’t know the major force of destruction she’s unleashing. The Sprite represents the life of a human being. She makes mistakes and from those mistakes she matures and becomes more beautiful and has more dignity. At the end of the film, she is in full control of the situation. We thought that this was a good message for the new millennium. It’s a message of hope about having trust in nature.
Gaëtan adds, The idea of death and rebirth came from listening to the music. It seemed to us that Stravinsky himself must have thought of this theme because the music has lots of different accents with some very strong beats and some very slow passages. It suggested the mystery of life. We interpreted that by showing the ecological direction following a disastrous eruption and the return of the wildlife. We took a poetic approach to the subject and tried to give it the same strong emotional feeling that the music evoked.
One of the things we love about working on Fantasia is the freedom it allows us to use animation as an art form and an expression. The music was a priority and we had to tell the story through the power of the music. Music is always inspiring to artists. We can do things a little bit differently and go outside the conventional rules of telling a story. It’s a chance to push the visuals and not be tied down to dialogue.
In creating the three central characters, the directors used a combination of traditional hand-drawn techniques and state-of-the-art computer tools. Anthony DeRosa supervised the animation of the Sprite, Ron Husband oversaw the animation of the elk and John Pomeroy was in charge of bringing the Firebird to life. Supervising special effects animator Ted Kierscey was responsible for adding the hand-drawn layers of smoke, fire and crusting lava to the Firebird character. Dave Bossert and his visual effects team, including CG supervisor Chyuan Huang, broke new ground with their work on the Sprite.
Bossert explains, Firebird was really the most challenging of all the segments from an effects standpoint.  We looked at some of the lava animation that was done in Rite of Spring as well as what was done for Aladdin. But we wanted to do something that was much different from the past. From studying live-action footage, it dawned on us that there’s always a crust forming on lava as it cools. We wanted to incorporate that as an element to define the Firebird character and make it a living, fiery creature. John Pomeroy did the rough animation for the character and Ted Kierscey would bring it to life using layers of hand-drawn effects animation to create the lava quality. The crust actually became an element that defines the character and kept it from appearing as just a blob of red.
Bossert adds, The Sprite is basically a 2D character animated by Tony DeRosa, but in order to have her fully blend in with the background, we incorporated a lot of computer generated 3D elements. She is basically made up of 50% effects. Mike Kaschalk was the CG animator for the final scene of the piece, which has over a million particles to give it the feel of a moving impressionistic painting.
Roy Disney concludes, This sequence presents another very personal journey. It’s about the world we live in and deals with its death and rebirth. The metaphor we used was Mt. St. Helens exploding and blighting the landscape. The aftermath of that was the rebirth of the environment and how the scar comes to heal itself. Everyone in the audience I think will have some identification with that. All of those forces are personified by a little Sprite who brings green to the forest. It’s a glorious abandon of joy.

Musical Background:

Igor Stravinsky was born in Russia in 1882 and was studying music with the great Rimski-Korsakov by the time that he was 20. Twelve years earlier, at the age of eight, he had seen a production of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty and was determined that he would one day write famous ballets.
The composer developed his own distinctive composing style, which has sometimes been described as shocking and revolutionary. He earned a reputation for being a maverick and is famous for veering from the accepted rules of harmony and rhythm.  Some critics even credit him with popularizing dissonance. His body of work is also known for its great sense of humor.
 It is said that if Petrushka made Stravinsky controversial, and The Rite of Spring made him notorious – The Firebird made him popular. The latter made the composer an overnight sensation on June 25, 1910, when the ballet and accompanying symphony was performed in Paris by the Ballet Russe. It was to be the 28-year old composer’s first triumph outside of Russia. The much touted “1919” version, which is featured in Fantasia 2000, is in fact virtually identical to the earlier one. Stravinsky, a master of self-promotion and hype, made much of his rewrite, but in fact it was all intended to extend his copyright which was about to run out.
The Firebird is based on a Russian fairy tale. The story that accompanies Stravinsky’s composition deals with a fantastic creature (half bird, half woman) clad in feathers of scarlet, gold, copper and vermilion, who is captured by a Prince and then freed. She rewards him with one of her magic feathers, which later serves to protect him from an evil wizard.
The Stravinsky composition The Rite of Spring was used in the 1940 Fantasia. Sixteen days after seeing a private studio screening of the film, he sold Disney an option to his Firebird music and added Renard and Fireworks to the bargain. When first contacted for the rights to Rite, Stravinsky offered to compose original music for Disney.
The composer once claimed that his music was best understood by children and animals. The composer was a great animal lover and always headed straight for the nearest zoo when he arrived in a new city. He also kept more than 100 birds as household pets.
Stravinsky died in New York in 1971. He is one of the few composers whose complete works were recorded mostly under his own supervision.