The rest of these animated sequences depend on gimmickry, cuteness, or facile ideology.

It provides some fine artists the chance to stretch and frolic, even as it reminds today's audiences of animation's limitless borders.

As with the original Fantasia, the new film is a mixture of artistically respectable and mediocre moments, which for overall ambition and range, has no parallel in the world of contemporary animation.

It's not that the images aren't pretty, or that great care hasn't gone into them -- it's that the sensibility behind them is so icky, limited in its conception of beauty to picture postcards and the sort of paintings you see in chain hotels.

Whatever its flaws -- from kitschy cupids to racist centaurs -- at least the first Fantasia had a human touch. The sequel seems cold and mechanical by comparison.