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In 1940, Walt Disney Productions combined classical music and cutting-edge animation to create Fantasia, which pushed the limits of the art form and earned rave reviews. With its luxurious hand-drawn visuals and masterful performances from the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski, Fantasia is still considered one of Disney’s greatest accomplishments ever. Prolific Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto’s Allegro Non Troppo, which arrived 36 years later in March 1976, doesn’t quite reach those creative heights, but in his efforts to parody the work of Walt Disney, Bozzetto managed to create a work of art that’s equally jaw-dropping — albeit for a somewhat different reason.
To put it simply: Allegro Non Troppo is the raunchiest Disney satire you’ve ever seen (discounting actual, Disney-inspired pornography). It’s also an excellent animated film on its own merits, and to celebrate the 50th anniversary, film distributor GKIDS is bringing a new 2K restoration to North America, starting with a weekend-long run at the Metrograph in New York City.
Allegro Non Troppo opens in black-and-white. A presenter (Maurizio Micheli) introduces the familiar concept — classic music matched to vivid, colorful animation — and then sets off to assemble his orchestra, which involves shepherding a gaggle of Italian grannies into a van. As the vehicle pulls away, he shouts from the front: “Pisney has already done this?!” Meanwhile, the conductor (Néstor Garay) heads to a prison where an animator (Maurizio Nichetti) is freed from his shackles and brought back to the theater.
Unlike Fantasia, where gorgeous animation simply appears from nowhere as Stokowski conducts, in Allegro Non Troppo, the animator is meant to be drawing his cartoons in real time, which adds a frenetic energy to the already chaotic proceedings. And unlike Fantasia’s mostly kid-friendly visuals (the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence is a bit scary), Allegro Non Troppo is definitely for adults.
The first sequence, set to Claude Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” follows a balding, old satyr who spends the entire song chasing various naked women while imagining that everything from the trees to the hills to the landscape itself is made of giant breasts. In another sequence, set to Antonio Vivaldi’s “Concerto in C major, RV 559,” an animated bumblebee tries to enjoy her meal but keeps getting interrupted by a pair of lovers rolling around in the grass and ultimately stings one of them on the butt. In between performances, the animator also strikes up a romance with a young cleaning woman (Marialuisa Giovannini). He later gets attacked by a gorilla, who then gets pulled offstage by one of the nonnas, who seems to have a crush on the giant ape.
That’s not to say every bit of animation in Allegro Non Troppo is sexually charged. One sequence charts the advancement of humankind from cave-dwellers to skyscrapers through the perspective of one misanthropic man. Another zooms out even further to trace the evolution of life from single-celled organisms to dinosaur-like creatures to evil, tool-wielding monkeys. The most touching sequence of the batch follows a stray cat as it explores the ruins of a house where it once lived happily. There’s also an Adam and Eve story, which splits the difference between horny and poignant by focusing on the downfall of the surprisingly sympathetic snake.
Every moment of Allegro Non Troppo is entertaining, from Bozzetto’s experimental animation to the comedic black-and-white live-action interludes to the mind-bending finale. It may not scratch that exact same nostalgic itch as Fantasia, but if you’ve never seen the Italian parody that dares to mock “Pisney” to his face, it’s worth checking this out in whatever form you can get your hands on — and especially in its restored, high-resolution glory.
Allegro Non Troppo is playing at the Metrograph from March 27 to April 2. Polygon asked GKIDS whether it plans to expand the rollout any further and will update this article once we receive a response.
