Director: Eric Goldberg
Featured Music: George Gershwin
Conductor and Supervisor: Bruce Broughton
Piano: Ralph Grierson
Art Director: Susan McKinsey Goldberg
Story: Eric Goldberg
Artistic Consultant: Al Hirschfeld
Co-Producer: Patricia Hicks
Layout: Rasoul Azadani
Backgrounds: Natalie Franscioni-Karp
Artistic Coordinator: Dan Hansen
Assistant Artistic Coordinator: David Blum
Visual Effects: Mauro Maressa
Clean-Up: Emily Jiuliano, Vera Lanpher-Pacheco
Production Manager: Loni Beckner-Black
Animators: Tim Allen, James Baker, Jared Beckstrand, Nancy Beiman, Jerry Yu Ching, Andreas Deja, Robert Espanto Domingo, Brian Ferguson, Douglas Frankel, Thomas Gately, David Hancock, Sang-Jin Kim, Bert Klein, Joe Oh, Jamie Oliff, Mark Pudleiner, Michael Show, Marc Smith, Chad Stewart, Michael Stocker, Andreas Wessel-Therhorn, Theresa Wiseman, Anthony Ho Wong, Ellen Woodbury, Phil Young

Description:

With Hirschfeld's blessing and approval, Eric Goldberg takes his admiration to the next level as he creates a whole world designed in the artist's unmistakable linear style. Set in Manhattan during the Jazz Age, this whimsical tale, with music by George Gershwin, follows several diverse characters as they weave in and out of each other's lives during the course of their daily routines.

Production Notes:

Director Eric Goldberg first paid homage to the style of legendary caricaturist Al Hirschfeld (still actively illustrating at age 96) when he designed and supervised the animation of the Genie in Aladdin.  Here – with Hirschfeld’s blessing and approval – he takes his admiration to the next level as he creates a whole world designed in the artist’s unmistakable linear style. Set in Manhattan during the Jazz Age, this whimsical tale follows several diverse characters as they weave in and out of each other’s lives during the course of their daily routines.
Seven years ago, I first spoke to Al Hirschfeld about the possibility of doing Rhapsody in Blue using his artistic style, recalls Goldberg. He said if he had been fifty years younger, he would have been on a train the next day to work on the project. Instead he gave us his permission to adapt any of his existing work. I knew the idea of Gershwin plus Hirschfeld plus 1930s New York was a strong one.

And I was thinking about it as a piece for Fantasia because I heard that the continuation was moving forward. I initially conceived it as a tone poem with a roving camera but I also knew that it would have to be story oriented with characters you could follow. Eventually, we came up with four main characters, continues the director. There’s Duke, a construction worker who dreams of being a jazz musician.

There’s John, who was modeled after journalist John Culhane (author of the Disney Editions book on the making of Fantasia 2000, the physical inspiration for the character of Mr. Snoops in The Rescuers and a longtime observer of the Disney Studio), who dreams of having fun in life and not being stuffy like his wife, Margaret. Then we have Joe, who is perpetually out of work and desperately in search of a job.

And finally, there’s Rachel, who is patterned a bit after my own daughter. She’s a little girl who basically gets dragged from lesson to lesson by an overzealous nanny. She’s not good at any of the lessons and really just wants to spend time with her mom and dad who are too busy with their daily routines to be with her. All four of them have problems that need resolution.

Having lived in New York for many years I was fascinated by the idea that this city, perhaps more than any environment in the world, is accepting of so many different types of people from so many different types of backgrounds and walks of life. People coexist on this tiny island and manage to achieve their goals by helping one another without ever realizing that they’re doing so just by the fact that they’re living cheek to jowl in an urban environment. This is what fascinated me about Rhapsody in Blue and got me interested in doing it in the first place. The music itself has slow passages, fast passages, humorous passages, repeats – things that you can capitalize upon in animation. You have to let the music drive the story.
With Hirschfeld’s approval, Goldberg began working on Rhapsody in 1998, after completing his directorial duties on Carnival of the Animals. The piece was originally intended to be a stand-alone short subject, but Roy Disney and Don Ernst expressed interest in including it on the program for Fantasia 2000. Goldberg proceeded to storyboard the entire 12-minute sequence and had the entire film ready to go when he received a final greenlight. An unexpected change in the production schedule at Feature Animation suddenly gave Goldberg the talent roster and resources he needed to make the project a reality. With all the advance preparation, the Rhapsody team was able to finish animation within a nine-month period. As it seems the worried artistis suffering the consequences of the production problems and delays of Kingdom of the Sun were assigned to this project, and once put to the task, they lived up to their brilliant reputations.
For the art direction of the sequence, Goldberg turned to his wife Susan (who also collaborated with him on Carnival of the Animals). Goldberg explains, Susan took her cue largely from Hirschfeld’s print work, primarily the things he had done in the 40s where he would use large blocks of color to define an area. She pushed that concept even a bit further. Emily Jiuliano, our co-head of clean-up, worked closely with Susan to ‘keep the line’ and make it communicate. Along with her clean-up partner Vera Lanpher-Pacheco, they miraculously managed to reproduce the thick and thin of Hirschfeld’s line so that the final image on screen felt like his drawings. Our layout supervisor, Rasoul Azadani, also did a great job of expanding Hirschfeld’s line cinematically to create a gorgeous landscape of 1930s New York.
 Susan adds, My main job as art director was to achieve really harmonious color and use it to direct the story. Color has an emotional value and you can create a lot more emotion in a scene by adding or eliminating certain colors. I can create an atmosphere or a state of mind by using a particular palette. For Rhapsody, we use a limited color palette from the 30s and 40s. Almost everything in the piece is a variation of blue ranging from monochromatic to rich shades of green, purple, turquoise and lavender. Skin tones are purple rather than flesh. Nothing is literal. Occasionally, a warm red or yellow is used to accent a particular color or mood.
Although most of the characters in Rhapsody were designed specifically by Goldberg and his team for this production, one particular character is modeled almost exactly from the original Hirschfeld caricature. That character is George Gershwin, who has a cameo appearance at the piano. Goldberg himself animated the scene with the legendary songwriter.
I’m somewhat of a stickler for detail, confesses Goldberg. So I insisted on having Gershwin playing the right keys when he’s at the piano. We shot live-action footage of our soloist Ralph Grierson and I analyzed close-ups of his fingers. Our music breakdown expert Kent Holaday once again helped me figure out which fingers would be hitting which black or white keys on which notes and I animated it as kind of a two step process. First I would do the body movements as an overall pattern that would fit the tone of the music he was playing. Then I went back and animated the arms and fingers on a separate level to hit the right keys. It was a bit tricky keeping the fingers in the Hirschfeld style – curlicues and broken knuckles – and make it seem like they were hitting the keys.
After completing animation on Rhapsody in Blue, the Goldbergs, Roy Disney and Don Ernst traveled back to New York to show it to Hirschfeld in his New York apartment. Goldberg recalls, I was Mr. Sweaty Palms. It was like showing your work to your hero. Fortunately, he thought it was great and that we had done such a great service to his work. He told us how pleased he was with how the line and the pose communicated. It was absolutely wonderful to show him and get his blessing. His wife, Louise, told us later that the following Monday was his 96th birthday and that seeing Rhapsody was the best birthday present he could have received.
Hirschfeld comments, I think they’ve done a remarkable job. It’s incredible, the communication of the line through animation and what those animators have done under the direction of Mr. Goldberg. It’s fantastic really and the animation is a creative thing in itself. I’m confined to a static piece of paper, but in film it’s a completely different creative process. I’m very pleased, flattered and impressed by what he’s done with the lines. I don’t know how he did it. It’s mysterious, like all art. The collaboration existed from his understanding what my drawings were all about and he’s translated them into animation that pleases me and I hope the audience to the same extent.
Walt Disney’s original inception was the line and the movement of line to communicate to a viewer. Rhapsody in Blue shows that it still works. I’m surprised every few seconds as another incident happens in the movie. It startles me and makes me realize how great animation is compared to the straight static line. I wrote the review of Fantasia in The Times back in 1940 and I thought it was remarkable. I also knew George Gershwin when I was a teenager and he was a very young man.  Rhapsody is very descriptive music and Mr. Goldberg has captured it beautifully on film.
 Goldberg adds, It was really a labor of love to do this piece. Hirschfeld’s work is timeless and it spans an entire century. His style doesn’t date and is evocative of so many different eras in which he worked. Al has a quote that became our motto during the production. He says when he doesn’t have the time, he makes a fussy complex drawing but when he has the time, he makes a simple drawing. Basically that means, take it down to its simplest elements and it’ll communicate.
Hirschfeld had one other impact on the Rhapsody in Blue sequence for Fantasia 2000.  His trademark hidden “Nina” appears several times in the piece, including the top and bottom of Margaret’s fur coat collar and a toothpaste tube.
According to Roy Disney, Rhapsody in Blue is simply one of the finest and best known pieces of American music ever written and has been a favorite with music-lovers for many generations. It conjures up a lot of visions and its hard to not see New York and subway trains when you’re listening to it. Eric had actually begun making it as separate short subject. We all descended on him and told him we’d love to include it in Fantasia 2000.  It really gives the whole movie a different look that it wouldn’t have had without it. It’s different from everything else in Fantasia yet it fits in at the same time. And I could actually say that about every single piece in the film.
As far as his experience on Fantasia 2000, Goldberg observes, I think it is very important for audiences to be able to see what our generation of artists can do with music and animation. They’re both such powerful forms of expression and when the two combine well, you can’t beat it. I hope we’ve done our predecessor proud and that people enjoy the pieces as much as we’ve enjoyed making them.

Musical Background:

The date was February 12, 1924. The setting was New York’s Aeolian Hall. The program was Paul Whiteman’s An Experiment in Modern Music. As the evening grew late, the crowd began to get restless. Suddenly the mood changed dramatically as 25 year old George Gershwin sat down at the piano to play his Rhapsody in Blue. The piece was an overnight sensation and helped to introduce jazz into the concert hall.
Gershwin’s famous composition almost never happened. Whiteman had invited Gershwin to write a piece for his Aeolian Hall program but the composer had been non committal. The bandleader decided to help things along by placing an item in the New York Times on January 3 announcing that Gershwin would be premiering a “jazz concerto” for the February event. Panicked into action and working quickly under deadline, Gershwin began writing four days later on his masterpiece. It was influenced by Liszt, blues music and the sound of a train trip Gershwin took to Boston. Within three weeks, he had completed a two-piano version of the Rhapsody. Ferde Grofé did the orchestrations for Whiteman’s band.
Gershwin himself was the soloist that evening at the Aeolian Hall. He did this out of necessity because he had not completed the solo piano part and had to improvise on the spot. Before he could acknowledge the thunderous applause that greeted his performance, he had to run backstage to have his hands bandaged. He had pounced so hard on the piano that there was actually blood on the keys. Ironically, the concerto was never recorded with Gershwin at the piano. The composer called the piece a “musical kaleidoscope of America -- our vast melting pot”.
A high school dropout at age 15, Gershwin achieved enormous success as a songwriter by age 19, when he wrote the music for Swanee. It became one of the first phonograph records ever made (recorded by Al Jolson) and it sold over two million copies. In 1931, the show Of Thee I Sing, for which he wrote the music, became the first musical to ever win the Pulitzer Prize. Sadly, Gershwin died in 1937, shortly before his 39th birthday. Rhapsody in Blue remains one of the most frequently played orchestral works written by an American.