Barry. Pribble left amazed at the "brilliantly-attired audience", while Tinee felt the film was "beautiful ... but it is also bewildering. It is stupendous. It is colossal. It is an overwhelmingly ambitious orgy of color, sound, and imagination." Barry was pleased with the "program of good music well performed ... and beautifully recorded" and felt "pleasantly distracted" from the music to what was shown on the screen. In a breakdown of reviews from both film and music critics, Disney author Paul Anderson found 33% to be "very positive", 22% both "positive" and "positive and negative", and 11% negative. Those who adopted a more negative view at the time of the film's release came mostly from the classical music community. Many found fault with Stokowski's rearrangements and abridgements of the music. Igor Stravinsky, the only living composer whose music was featured in the film, expressed displeasure at how in Stokowski's arrangement of The Rite of Spring, "the order of the pieces had been shuffled, and the most difficult of them eliminated", and criticized the orchestra's performance, observing that the simplification of the score "did not save the musical performance, which was execrable". Other composers and music critics leveled criticism at the premise of the film itself, arguing that presenting classical music with visual images would rob the musical pieces of their integrity. Composer and music critic Virgil Thomson praised Fantasound which he thought offered "good transmission of music", but disliked the "musical taste" of Stokowski, with exception to The Sorcerer's Apprentice and The Rite of Spring. Olin Downes of The New York Times too hailed the quality of sound that Fantasound presented, but said, "much of Fantasia distracted from or directly injured the scores". Film critic Pauline Kael dismissed parts of Fantasia as "grotesquely kitschy". Some parents resisted paying the higher roadshow prices for their children, and several complained that the Night on Bald Mountain segment had frightened them. There were also a few negative reactions that were more political in nature, especially since the film's release happened at a time when Nazi Germany reigned supreme in Europe. One review of the film in this manner, written by Dorothy Thompson for The New York Herald Tribune on November 25, 1940, was especially harsh. Thompson claimed that she "left the theater in a condition bordering on nervous breakdown", because the film was a "remarkable nightmare". Thompson went on to compare the film