Director: Francis Glebas
Featured Music: Sir Edward Elgar (Pomp and Circumstance, Marches 1, 2, 3 $ 4)
Choral Performance: The Chicago Symphony Chorus
Feature Soprano: Kathleen Battle
Art Director: Daniel Cooper
Donald and Daisy Lead Animator: Tim Allen
Animators: Doug Bennett, Tim George, Mark Kausler, Sang-Jin Kim, Roy Meurin, Gregory G. Miller
 

Description:

Donald Duck has always been a bit envious of Mickey's star status and now, after 60 years, he finally gets equal billing. In this entertaining episode, the highly flappable duck takes on the role of Noah's assistant and finds himself leading a procession of animal couples onto the ark. When he becomes separated from his own better half, Daisy Duck, confusion follows along with much pomp and some comical circumstance. Francis Glebas directs this segment of the film, which features rich classic-style animation. The special musical arrangement by Peter Schickele utilizes parts from four of Elgar's popular marches to create this exciting rendition.

Production Notes:

The rivalry between Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck has been a long-standing one. So after six decades of having the Fantasia spotlight all to himself, the team responsible for Fantasia 2000 decided it was about time to give the highly flappable duck equal billing with a sequence of his own.

Pomp and Circumstance is a famous and traditional march by England’s Sir Edward Elgar that is familiar to anyone who has ever attended a high school or college graduation. In fact, it was this familiarity that led Disney Company chairman Michael Eisner to suggest it as a piece for Fantasia 2000. Eisner felt that the music was so closely associated with happy occasions and a variety of deep emotions that it would be an ideal candidate to include in the continuation of Fantasia. As it turned out, the filmmakers chose to tell the story of perhaps the grandest procession of them all.

Director Francis Glebas recalls, I’d been working on several different pieces for Fantasia 2000 and one of the ideas I came up with involved Noah’s Ark and the hard time he must have had getting all those animals on the ark. It seemed like an idea laden with comic possibilities and I did a little test with Noah as the main figure set to the music of Barber of Seville. I thought it was very, very funny but it needed something more. Next, we tried it with Dvorák’s Ninth Symphony, which gave it a very regal uplifting sound. None of the things we tried quite worked. Around this time, the filmmakers were trying to find a story to go with Pomp and Circumstance and which would feature Donald Duck. So I suggested using Donald as Noah’s assistant. It basically evolved from there. Roy Disney suggested that we put Daisy in the story and that gave it a lot of resonance. The idea of star-crossed lovers that couldn’t find each other added all kinds of dramatic possibilities and an emotional richness that it didn’t have before.
Glebas adds, The real challenge with this piece has been to tell the story to the beat of the music. We’ve rearranged it slightly but you still have to basically go with the flow of it. The other thing is that its like making a silent movie without subtitles, in a sense. You have to figure out how to say something on the screen without any words. And I think our animators have achieved that brilliantly. Donald’s personality comes across very clearly even without his characteristic quacking. He doesn’t say a word and yet you still know its Donald. One of the joys is having a new generation of kids discovering Donald for the first time.
I saw Fantasia for the first time when I was in film school and I felt it was a true masterpiece. It was the supreme achievement of animation and something that we wanted to strive towards. With this film, it’s our challenge to come up with great stories and present them with wonderful animation in that great Disney tradition.
The task of arranging this famous piece of music fell to the distinguished musician Peter Schickele (aka PDQ Bach). He explains, Most people don’t realize that Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance is one of five marches. We decided to take excerpts from four of those marches and so I put together segments from the different marches to create something that I hope has a continuity all its own. It fits more closely with the storyline and has a much wider range of emotion than the one famous march does.
One of the main reasons I took the job is because I love animation so much, he adds. I’m not an artist at all myself but I’ve always loved animation and one of the things I enjoyed so much about this collaboration is that I worked from a variety of the sketches. I just love the liveliness of the line.
They also asked me to add a chorus at the end, which Elgar had not included. It was decided that it would be nice to have a soprano soaring over the melody the very last time you hear it so we brought in Kathleen Battle to overdub at the end after the music had been recorded. We also took a few other liberties like placing a little flute piccolo line near the end when there are a bunch of birds flying around. I did a little slide on the tympani that Elgar would never have done. He probably would have lost his knighthood if he had.
James Levine notes, When we were recording this piece, I kept trying to find ways to keep the sound animated because it’s not as inherent here as in some of the film’s other musical selections. Pomp and Circumstance is kind of a progression. As we talked about the animation and story for the piece, it affected the vitality of the performance a great deal. I think the performance of that particular piece is absolutely unique for this purpose. We all know this tune and have associations with it, but now its great fun to see it in a whole new way. Instead of sounding repetitive or long, you’ll have the feeling it goes by in a flash because the animation is paced in a way that’s different. The sound and picture function not only together but on two different levels at the same time. It’s an absolutely brilliant piece of work.
Roy Disney observes, I love the idea of giving Donald equal time. He’s always had that position of second banana but he actually grew to be more popular than Mickey. It was great to really be able to animate Donald in the way that we remember him. The design of the piece is really the classic Donald that everyone remembers. And without dialogue, you don’t have to worry about being able to understand what he’s saying and you can still see him getting angry.

Musical Background:

Sir Edward Elgar was born in 1857 in a small village in the English West Midlands. The son of a music shop proprietor and piano tuner, Elgar would go on to become the most important 20th Century English composer with a prolific catalogue of orchestral works. The talented composer had a way with marches and English patriotism. Among his other compositions, he created the Imperial March for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and a World War I cantata called The Spirit of England.
Elgar came to national attention at the age of 42 in 1989 with his Variations on an Original Theme (also known as Enigma Variations). Over the next two decades, he would compose two symphonies, several oratorios, cantatas and compositions for the violin, on which he was proficient. His masterpiece is considered The Dream of Gerontius, an oratorio-style work for orchestra, chorus and soloists based on a religious poem. After his beloved wife’s death in 1920, he ceased composing. He continued to record and conduct at concerts, but only his own works.
Elgar composed the first two Pomp and Circumstance marches in 1901. March No. 3 came along in 1904 and No. 4 debuted in 1907. The fifth march was not introduced until 1930 and was based on ideas he had jotted down many years earlier. The marches contain the famous trio section, which has come to be closely associated with graduation ceremony processionals. March No. 1 in D minor is world famous. That musical composition, also known as The Land of Hope and Glory, became an instant favorite with King Edward VII. Laurence Housman added lyrics to the piece one year after its introduction. Elgar appreciated the worth of Pomp from the very start. He predicted, I’ve got a tune that will knock ‘em – knock ‘em flat!  A tune like that comes once in a lifetime.
The many honors bestowed on Elgar include being knighted in 1904, being named Master of the King’s Music in 1924, and receiving numerous honorary doctor of music degrees from American and English colleges and universities. He died in 1934.
The phrase “pomp and circumstance” originated in Othello: “pomp and circumstance of glorious war”.