Musicana

An animated shorts series produced by The Walt Disney Company.

## Premise

An animated anthology series that acts as a sequel/spin-off to Fantasia and Fantasia 2000.

## Production

Musicana was originally in development as a movie at Walt Disney Animation in the 1980's. The project will be reworked into a 10 episode shorts series with each episode set in and highlighting the culture of a different country - both visually and musically.

## Music and Sound

The series will incorporate classic music from several different countries and cultures around the world.

## Episodes

Though the project was never made into a movie as originally intended, all six of the segments to be used in the film had been written and storyboarded. Each segment will be redeveloped into one stand-alone episode in the series with an additional 4 episodes also being written.

* **By the Bayou.** Set in the Deep South, a colony of frogs in a bayou will take on the form a jazz band, playing instruments such as the piano, drums and trumpet. Two pieces of music will be used in this segment, one by Ella Fitzgerald and another by Louis Armstrong. At the end of the sequence a riverboat will go by and wash all the frogs around.

* **South American/Yma Sumac Sequence.** A sequence set in South America, using a lot of Aztec and Incan mythology. The music will be a song by Peruvian soprano Yma Sumac.

* **The Rain God.** Set in Africa, this sequence will tell the story of a monkey who steels a diamond from the rain god. Angered, the god refuses to make it rain again until his diamond is returned. As a result the rivers dry up and the animals have nothing to drink. They then set about catching the monkey and making him return the diamond. The art for this sequence was designed by Ken Anderson.
* **The Emperor and the Nightingale.** Based on the story *The Nightingale* by Hans Christian Andersen, this sequence will feature Mickey Mouse as a servant of the Emperor of China. As in the source story, the Emperor hears of a Nightingale with a beautiful voice and asks to hear it's song. Mickey then befriends the Nightingale and convinces him to sing for the Emperor. The Emperor then keeps the Nightingale in his palace and make him sing upon request, only for him to be forgotten when the Emperor is presented with a bejewelled, mechanical Nightingale which also sings. The Nightingale goes into self-imposed exile after this, and Mickey continues to befriend him. One of the artists who worked on this sequence was John Lasseter.
* **Finlandia.** Set in Scandinavia, an ice god and a sun goddess do battle, using the forces of nature at their disposal to do so. The conflict leads to the creation of the great lakes of the sub-continent. This segment will be set to *Finlandia* by John Sibelius
* **Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.** An animated version of the story from the *One Thousand and One Nights*. The music intended to be used is *Scheherazade* by Rimsky-Korsakov. The characters in this sequence will be anthropomorphic birds instead of humans; Ali Baba will be drawn as a grey dove, while the leader of the thieves will be drawn as a hawk.

## Release

The series will be released worldwide exclusively on Disney+