As we pan over the theater stage of Allegro non Troppo - the cleaning woman’s mop and bucket reverberating as in a cavern made of metal, her rug-beating stirring the air like a giant’s basketball in the Gym on Bald Mountain – we hear the voice of a god. Actually, we’ll soon see it as the voice of a soft-faced man in an expensively tacky floral suit, 1977-style bad taste, but he and the subtitle-writer give us his version of the only review Allegro will ever need. “You are about to see an unforgettable show, a film destined to become immortal; as immortal as the music which will follow… with this film we have succeeded in attaining the perfect union of classical music and animation … a film of powerful originality which has startled even us, the creators. A film in which – in which – in which” (as he ruffles through his note cards, his disrupted Italian sputters like Porky Pig) “in which you will literally see the music and hear the drawings. You might call it a film of magic, a fantasia”.

He is interrupted by a phone call from Hollywood. Someone seems to be yammering to him about some Phisney or Grisney fellow, but luckily our emcee shuts them up. After years of planning, the project’s big day is here, and the ladies of the orchestra are hustled in, to stand or to seat themselves in metal folding chairs. Even more momentously, the emcee escorts us through dim corridors to the holding cell where the animator himself has been stored for safe-keeping. “He’s been more excitable than usual this morning”, he stage-whispers to us, as the animator is unshackled. “Clearly, he knows it is the big day”.

The animator – bespectacled, gentle, and shaggy in the 1977 way of hippie holdouts, beat poets, and people denied access to razors or water – is seated onstage at a drafting table, where his slapstick attempts to keep a bottle of ink within reach will resonate with anyone (me and Cindy included) who’s ever spent a lot of time using a drafting table. The anticipation builds – or in the orchestra’s case it’s more like impatience – as he sketches something, crumples it, sketches something else, crumples that too. Then he gets a flow going, and our fantasia can begin.

**********
For half the movie, Allegro non Troppo sticks clearly to the Fantasia model: animation set to music alternates with live-action scenes involving an orchestra. (You didn’t remember that Fantasia had live-“action”? Me neither, but we learn from the DVD interview with Allegro writer-director Bruno Bozzetto that he watched most of Disney’s movies like a dozen times each … even, it seems, the pretentious educational interludes.)

Bozzetto and company share a much more whimsical vision, to be sure: the drawing style often reminds me of comics like B.C., the Pink Panther, and South Park, with one fairytale-princess vision looking quite a bit like an overdressed Sally Forth (not that she or a post-elementary school Trey Parker existed when this movie was made). The first piece, set to a Debussy prelude, is a cartoon sex farce in which two naked rutting humans are making the woods a dangerous place for all the little naked rutting sprites and imps and faeries.

The second and third pieces (to Dvorak’s “Slavonic Dance #7” and Ravel’s great “Bolero”) do deal with such huge themes as urbanization, fascism, and evolution, true. But for fun: the Dvorak animation is broad and over-the-top, and even the Ravel animation – elegant and propulsive and novel, as involving as anything on the Disney roster – builds to a goofy punchline.

However, our emcee for this fantasia has already exposed himself as a fatuous and unkind man, and his neat format will last no longer than the temper of the man he’s employed to do the drawings. By the halfway point, the animator has been yelled at too often about his moments of dark humor. He has been clumsily diverted every time he’s tried to flirt with the pretty brunette cleaning woman we met at the beginning. Intermission seals the deal, for him: the emcee sits down to a lushly catered chicken dinner. The animator draws a scurrilous little man and asks his drawing to scamper across the stage and fetch him some chicken – which it makes a lively attempt to do. It is killed when the emcee drops a smoldering cigarette butt on it, however, and from there, reality is no longer allowed to draw such stern, organized borders between events.

**********
The animations still happen, mind you. The fourth, to Sibelius’s “Valse Triste”, is drawn defiantly, the animator’s idea of a masterpiece, which I guess it is. It's the gorgeously observed last moments of a forlorn cat, hallucinating about his happy early life with humans while he stalks the windowsills of an abandoned apartment building. The cat is drawn beautifully and precisely: how he stretches, how he rubs his cheek blissfully against a human hand, how he blinks at he realizes he’s actually rubbing against stone, how he pulls back from the edge in a way that quickly converts alarm into “I meant to do that” and starts licking his paws. I don’t think I want to watch this scene again, though. I don’t know why watching one fictional cat hits my tear reflexes when, say, the drowning of a real city does not; but I think it has to do with the utter simplicity of a housecat’s needs and dreams, the way cats, unlike people, can be happy forever with small bowls of milk and lush carpets and electric lights and a bit of appreciation. Human misery happens for complicated reasons; feeding and petting every cat should be _easy_. I need to end this paragraph; no wonder the orchestra women throw soaked Kleenexes at the animator when the “Triste” show is done.

Despite that scene, though, Allegro becomes a steadily sillier and more wonderful ride as it unravels. The animator is chased around the stage; the chase turns into a Marx-Brothers-style dance sequence, and when the record suddenly slows down and its notes go bass and sickly, the dancers slow and stop, off-balance but obedient. A man falls down onstage and goes _through_ the stage, leaving a Wile E. Coyote-style hole where he fell. The emcee holds another phone chat with an animated Igor creature, whose world seems to physically intersect with the real one in ways that make Who Framed Roger Rabbit? look naturalistic. The last two pure animation segments reject the laws of physics and sense with more and more energy, in more and more different ways; yet by the time they end, the live-action is arguably even weirder.

Allegro non Troppo has some broad, obvious jokes. It also has some very tricky, maze-like humor, and the movie’s sunny outlook makes painless the pro-environment, anti-fascist glint behind some of the gags. Some of the animation is beautiful, layered, and absolutely worthy of being taken seriously as art. I haven’t tested the movie’s replay value, but I think it should be very high, because it works on so many levels.

Just in case I’m wrong, the DVD’s value still lingers, for two reasons. First, the lengthy interview with Bozzetto is charming and funny. I particularly like how he used to make student films, but could never get his friends to sit still long enough to do all the re-takes, and so he turned to documentaries. Especially nature documentaries; what insect is going to slouch on your sofa and whine “I’ve already been an insect for the last three hours! Can’t we do something else?” Bozzetto says he got his interest in ecology from Bambi, btw, which is also nifty.

Meanwhile, “the World of Bozzetto” gives us a best-of from his lengthy career in animation. He was a warped man, and he could draw. It’s a good combination.

Recommended: Yes