Fantasia

"Fantasia" has cleaned up its act, so to speak.

This great — some would say the greatest — animation triumph of Walt Disney has been the subject of a restoration project for the past two years.

Not that anything was missing, really. It was just dirty.

And now the color is richer, the Leopold Stokowski-conducted score has been restored (it was replaced by a new digital stereo score in 1985) and it has been returned to its original screen size in the "box" format.

What that means is that muddier colors have been illuminated by the cleaning process, the music matches the action more perfectly and the picture is no longer stretched by virtue of trying to make it bigger.

It's the return of an old friend in better shape, a stunning work that combines classical music with imaginative animation, ranging from the comic to the lyrical to the chilling to the mesmerizing.

Mickey Mouse is still battling broomsticks in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," abstract images grace the music of Bach, Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker Suite" is shown with dancing foliage and fairies ranging from flowers and mushrooms to mischievous nymphs, Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours" gets comical treatment from dancing hippos and crocodiles and ostriches, and the evil of night meets the sweetness of dawn with a medley of Mussorgsky and Schubert, "Night on Bald Mountain" and "Ave Maria," respectively.

Whether this film will, as Walt Disney had hoped, introduce young audiences to classical music in a way that will stay with them is debatable, but there's no question that "Fantasia" remains one of Disney's singularly most amazing achievements.

Take the family — it's rated G. (Though small children may be a bit unnerved by the images of the devil and of a vicious dinosaur in the Stravinsky "Rite of Spring" sequence.)

— THE RESTORATION PROJECT for "Fantasia" is not to be confused with the restoration of "Lawrence of Arabia" or "A Star Is Born" or "Lost Horizon," where footage was found that had been missing from those classic films for many years.

But there was a "jigsaw-puzzle effect" in the restoration of "Fantasia," as a team of four prowled the Disney vaults looking for pieces of the original negative to restore the film to its purity. In fact, with the aid of advanced modern technology, the Disney folks feel the film actually

looks sharper than it did 50 years ago.