Fantasia opens as an orchestra's shadows appear on screen as the members take their places with their instruments. Deems Taylor, the narrator, welcomes everyone to the film by Walt Disney. He explains that the viewers will be seeing the images and pictures brought to the minds of the artists. Some pictures may be impressions, abstractions, colors, landscapes, people, or stories. There are also three kinds of music included in the performance: the kind that tells a definite story, the kind that does not have a definite plot, but creates certain types of pictures, and music that leads only to abstract pictures in the mind of the listener. Leopold Stokowski leads the Philadelphia Orchestra as the film begins with Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor."

First, the background is simply of Stokowski with colors lighting up behind him and his orchestra. As the music...