FANTASIA, BOLDLY INSCRIBED BY WALT DISNEY, WITH AN ORIGINAL DRAWING BY FAMOUS ANIMATOR ART BABBITT

DISNEY STUDIOS. Walt Disney’s Fantasia. By Deems Taylor. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940. Folio (10 by 13-1/2 inches), original tan cloth, pictorial endpapers, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

First edition of the lavishly illustrated companion volume to Disney’s animated musical masterpiece, with numerous color images from the film— including 16 mounted color plates— boldly inscribed by the visionary artist on page [8], “To Jeanne, With My Best Wishes, Walt Disney,” and with an original signed hand-colored drawing of the Chinese mushrooms by Art Babbitt facing the title page.

“Motion picture history was made at the Broadway Theatre last night with the spectacular world premiere of Walt Disney’s long-awaited Fantasia… Mr. Disney and his troop of little men, together with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra and a corps of sound engineers, have fashioned with music and colors and animated figures on a screen a creation so thoroughly delightful and exciting in its novelty that one’s senses are captivated by it, one’s imagination is deliciously inspired” (New York Times). “Serious music had never been so attractively portrayed and untold youngsters were drawn to Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky by the snippets they heard in Fantasia” (Lebrecht, 143). Disney said of his animated orchestral masterpiece, “Fantasia is timeless. It may run ten, twenty, thirty years… Fantasia is an idea in itself. I can never build another.” Fantasia in book form is a compilation of the most memorable images from the movie, accompanied by popular composer Deems Taylor’s lively interpretive text and conductor Leopold Stokowski’s foreword. The original drawing in this copy, by famous Disney animator Art Babbitt, depicts the “Chinese Dance” from the closing suite of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, in the form of a group of mushrooms performing “a solemn little dance, composed chiefly of dignified hoppings and quadrille figures,” the littlest among them humorously unable to keep in step. Babbitt gained a reputation as “The Greatest Animator Ever” (Feild). Gilt-stamp to front cover “Jeanne Perry.”

Inscription and drawing fine, expert restoration to original cloth and front inner hinge. Price-clipped dust jacket with rubbing and creasing, tape repairs on verso to large tears. Very desirable inscribed and with an original drawing.