An Optical Poem
Mental imagery of music is visualized with two-dimensional shapes dancing to the rhythm of Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.
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⭐ Featured Review
"Listed as a 1938 film but perhaps first shown in 1937 since the TCM website states that as the year audiences first viewed An Optical Poem, this was a pioneering animation short. I'm surprised I never watched it before the year 2019, TCM should be showing it more often (and other stop-motion independent shorts from the time). While watching this short I began to think of how it was made. It's using stop motion, taking a picture of the scene and then moving the items in the frame a slight bit at a time and taking another picture and so many thousands of times. TCM has a lot of informa..."
💡 Did You Know?
As this was released two years before "Fantasia," it's reasonable to assume either Disney or someone who worked for him saw this and realized the possibilities of non-narrative animation set to classical music; certainly the "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" sequence bears a striking similarity.
📖 Synopsis
Mental imagery of music is visualized with two-dimensional shapes dancing to the rhythm of Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.