10 Fascinating Facts You Never Knew About Fantasia

For the piece called The Pastoral Symphony, the animation featured centaurs and other fantastical characters gathering to honour Bacchus, the god of wine. The party disturbs Zeus, who begins to throw lightning bolts at everyone. The segment features many different colourful characters as well as the afore mentioned centaurs and the female centaurettes.

The original version of the centaurettes were already controversial with them appearing entirely topless. This led to them eventually being ordered to place bras and floral garlands around their breasts to appease censors. The most controversial issue however was a pair of centaurettes who became incredibly insensitive in later years.

The first was a character called Sunflower, a young black character with stereotypically large lips who waited on the other centaurs, polished their hooves and braided their hair, i.e. a slave.

There was another character who was arguably worse, whose horse half was modelled after a zebra and the human half was a typically African style with high hair and, according to models that existed, was again braless. Needless to say, in later releases these characters were reworked or cut from the film entirely with basic editing.