Nutcracker Suite

The Nutcracker Suite is the second segment of Fantasia.

Synopsis
The Nutcracker Suite, a selection of pieces from Tchaikovsky's now-classic ballet The Nutcracker, is a personified depiction of the changing of the seasons; first from summer to autumn, and then from autumn to winter. Unlike the original Tchaikovsky ballet, this version of The Nutcracker has no plot. It features a variety of dances, just as in the original, but danced by animated fairies, fish, flowers, mushrooms, and leaves; no actual nutcracker is ever seen in this version. Many elements are rendered carefully and painstakingly using techniques such as drybrush and airbrush. The musical segments are as follows:

As dawn breaks over a meadow, during the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy", tiny fairies sprinkle drops of dew on every flower and stern.

A cluster of tiny mushrooms, dressed in long robes and coolie hats resembling Chinese (plus one little mushroom always out-of-step), perform the "Chinese Dance".

Multicolored blossoms shaped like ballerinas perform the "Dance of the Flutes".

A school of underwater goldfish perform a graceful "Arab Dance".

High-kicking thistles, dressed like Cossacks, and orchids, dressed like lovely Russian peasant girls, join together for the wild "Russian Dance".

In the final musical segment, "Waltz of the Flowers", autumn fairies color everything they touch brown and gold with their wands. Then the frost fairies arrive and everything becomes part of an icy, jewellike pattern among falling snow flakes.

One quaint novelty of the full-length roadshow version of Fantasia is that, during his commentary on the Nutcracker Suite, Deems Taylor observes that the complete ballet The Nutcracker "is never performed anymore." The United States did not see a complete staging of the Nutcracker until 1944, four years after Fantasia, and George Balanchine's 1954 staging with the New York City Ballet established the modern tradition of performing the ballet at Christmas time.

Credits

 * Musical score: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – Nutcracker Suite Op. 71a
 * Directed by Samuel Armstrong
 * Story development: Sylvia Moberly-Holland, Norman Wright, Albert Heath, Bianca Majolie, and Graham Heid
 * Character designs: John Walbridge, Elmer Plummer, and Ethel Kulsar
 * Art direction: Robert Cormack, Al Zinnen, Curtiss D. Perkins, Arthur Byram, and Bruce Bushman
 * Background painting: John Hench, Ethel Kulsar, and Nino Carbe
 * Animation: Art Babbitt, Les Clark, Don Lusk, Cy Young, and Robert Stokes
 * Choreography: Jules Engel