Walt Disney's 1939 animated feature Fantasia was a marriage of music and animation that drew upon all of the animation techniques in use at the time and that extended the range of the animated film to a great degree. Fantasia would also be a highly influential film, though it was not widely imitated in terms of feature films because of the great expense involved and the uncertainties of a commercial audience for to many of this type of animated film. Classical music, after all, was not widely popular in the way other forms of music were then or now, and Fantasia had the advantage of being unique in its time. The most openly imitative feature to follow would come some time later with Allegro non Troppo by Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto in 1976. Bozzetto deliberately covers much of the same territory as he takes a satiric thrust at the earlier film, and the two films show very different sensibilities, different animation styles, and a different attitude toward the audience. For all its seemingly non-commercial elements--notably the classical music and the fact that the film is a series of shorts rather than a coherent narrative--Fantasia was a commercial work produced by a commercial studio, one noted at the time primarily for its animated shorts and features and not for the live-action features that would follow. Bozzetto operates his own studio in Italy and is independent of any outside control beyond whatever commercial considerations may influence him, yet his film is commercial in certain respects and seems based on an assessment that a satire of Fantasia would find an audience.
What was most influential about Fantasia and what would be imitated most by other filmmakers were some of the animation techniques, from the expressionistic sequences that open the film to the narrative use of music in the "Sorceror's Apprentice" and to the mixture of live action and animation that had been explored by other filmmakers before, th...