The Sorcerer’s Apprentice resonates with its own period, and with a contemporary Hollywood transformed aesthetically and culturally by Jewish émigrés from Europe, including the talented abstract animator on Fantasia, Oskar Fischinger. The horrifying image of the multiplying broomsticks marching in fascist lockstep, their nightmarish shadows cast menacingly on the wall, echoes the topical iconography of Nazi military power. The apprentice has summoned forth a cinematic sequence from Leni Riefenstahl. The powerfully dangerous sorcerer’s book thus resonates with another necromantic volume, Mein Kampf, and its dark arts of national resurgence and racial purity.
— Emma Smith: Portable Magic