Neo-Fantasia

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

ALLEGRO NON TROPPO Directed by Bruno Bozzetto Screenplay by Bruno Bozzetto, Guide Manuli and Maurizio Nichetti

A horny faun who spends his afternoon chasing--and being rejected by--nubile nudes; a serpent whose proffered apple is spurned by Adam and Eve and who makes the mistake of swallowing it himself, only to be driven to despair by modern society; a spilled drop of Coke that becomes the primal seed for an army of fantastic monsters; a tidy bee whose neat little world is crushed by the love thrashings of a monstrous (to her eyes) human couple.

All this--and more of a similarly sardonic, ironic nature--enlivens this animated feature from Italy. Clearly not intended for the eyes of young children, Allegro Non Troppo (fast but not too fast) aspires to do for modern audiences what Fantasia did in its day: demonstrate the state of the animator's art as it now exists and lightly suggest its many and varied possibilities as a medium for serious expression. In this regard, it is quite successful.

Setting their work to well-known pieces of classical music, in the manner of Fantasia, Bozzetto and his talented team have created half a dozen imaginative sequences in which their characters--and characterizations--take wing. Using a cheerfully baroque style, free flowing and strong in color and design, the Italians have matched the richness that Disney's animators developed in their great, early years, before their boss forced them into the slick, highly conventionalized mode that has dulled his studio's work ever since Fantasia's early commercial failure. (In rerelease, of course, the movie has been enormously successful.)

On the one hand, Bozzetto's animators have shown none of the wretched excesses and artistic ineptitude of Ralph Bakshi, he of the X-rated films. At the same time, the Italians have avoided the sterile abstractions and moral sentimentality that afflict so much contemporary European animation. The underlying cheekiness of Bozzetto's work rescues it from the pretentiousness that has flawed so many well-meant efforts to demonstrate the range and capabilities of animation.

Indeed, the production may go some what too far in this direction. To complete the analogy with Fantasia, the film's animated sequences are linked by live-action scenes in which a cruel conductor and an overworked animator are shown in contentious collaboration, farcically knocking each other about and sending up the dignified portentousness of Conductor Leopold Stokowski and Commentator Deems Taylor in their portions of the Disney picture. This is strictly high school skit stuff, far below the general level of the animated material it introduces. The effort ill serves the cause of expanding the audience for serious animation beyond the cult level. Unfortunately that is still what it was in 1940, when Disney made his noble effort to suggest the rich possibilities of his art.

Bozzetto's work will be welcomed by the already converted--as it should be--but whether the skeptical will also respond to the film in sizable numbers remains, alas, problematical. Allegro Non Troppo is worth a try--what ever your lingering feelings about Porky Pig.%#151;Richard Schickel

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