Mickey Mouse, in his role as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, stands alone on a black pinnacle in the depths of his own dream, one hand thrust out to command the sea. He has just swept the stars across the heavens, and in the same breath he turns to the ocean, pulling it up around him in great green walls of water at the point of a finger.
This gouache concept painting, from the most famous segment of Fantasia, catches the fantasy at its height: the apprentice as master of the elements, calling up waves that rear and break at his command while he conducts them like an orchestra. It is the dream of everything he wishes he were, moments before he wakes to everything he is.
The painting is worked in gouache on heavy dark board, the light laid onto the blackness rather than the other way around. Here the method turns loud. Against the void the artist has driven diagonal sweeps of green and white for the surging water, the foam caught in quick bright strokes, Mickey's robe and hat carried in deep violet so the small figure holds the centre while the sea tears across the board around him. It is staging built for impact, the colour and the diagonals worked out on board to find how this moment of delusion should feel before it reached the screen.
Walt Disney was explicit about what he wanted from this passage. He told his team to caricature an orchestra conductor, Mickey on the rock directing "those planets and those comets" and then pulling up the ocean. The joke runs deep, because Fantasia is itself a film built on conducting, on Leopold Stokowski drawing image and music together, and here the apprentice plays at the same godlike control he has not earned. The Sorcerer's Apprentice began life in the late 1930s as a deluxe Silly Symphony, a vehicle to restore Mickey's standing as Donald and Goofy gained on him, set to Paul Dukas's 1897 scherzo. When its costs outgrew a single short, Disney expanded it into the feature that became Fantasia, and this dream of cosmic command became the emotional peak of the whole segment.
At approximately 17cm by 17cm the board carries a pin hole at each corner, the marks of a working reference that was pinned and used at the studio rather than kept for show. The water itself, the waves that answer Mickey's hand here, was the province of Ugo D'Orsi, the effects animator who drew the dream sequence's crashing seas, working in pencil and paint scene by scene. The segment was directed by James Algar, with Mickey redesigned for the film by Fred Moore.
Paintings of this kind were tools made to guide the picture rather than to outlast it, and most were worn out or thrown away once their job was done.
Estimate: £9,000 - £18,000 Ω
See Online Here: 164. Mickey Mouse as the Sorceror Conducts the Stars & Waves Original Goache on Black Board Concept Painting ### FANTASIA (1940)
