Inspiration comes from the strangest places at Walt Disney Pictures. Recent films released by the studio can trace their roots back to classic works of literature (Alice in Wonderland, A Christmas Carol), video game franchises (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time), and a popular theme-park ride (Pirates of the Caribbean).

Yet even in this potentially limitless realm of adaptable, creative ideas, Jon Turteltaub's kid-focused fantasy The Sorcerer's Apprentice boasts a unique muse. It owes its existence to an eight-minute animated sequence found in a 70-year-old film. Granted, both the film and the clip are famous in their own right. We're talking about Mickey Mouse's magical "Sorcerer's Apprentice" routine from the 1940s classic, Fantasia. But it's still an odd clip to use as a springboard for an effects-laden 21st century summer blockbuster.

Not so odd that it doesn't work, however. Turteltaub and his screenwriting team start deep in the past, where apprentices of the legendary Merlin find themselves in a battle with Morgana (Alice Krige), a vicious foe. Former ally Horvath (Alfred Molina) has gone rogue, siding with Morgana in the fight. Balthazar (Nicolas Cage) tries to stop them, but doesn't act fast enough to rescue his beloved, Veronica (Monica Bellucci), from an elaborate prison. Our distraught hero is told only one person -- the Prime Merlinian -- has the power to defeat Morgana, so Balthazar spends centuries looking for this fabled individual.

Having established the mystical elements, Apprentice quickly modernizes its story. Stepping in for Mickey is the mousy Jay Baruchel, the lanky guy from Tropic Thunder and Knocked Up, who stammers through the part of Dave, a book smart teenager with a nose for science and a knack for magic only Balthazar can see. Together, they dance through a traditional formula of teacher and student combining talents to defeat a greater power.

Apprentice succeeds because Turteltaub rarely forgets the age-range, and attention span, of his target audience. Cage tailors his gonzo riffs to the film's family-friendly antics and finds sizable laughs. Perhaps inspired by his cartoon source material, the star makes for an animated master tutoring an eager Baruchel in all things sorcery. Neither he nor Molina unleash their inner scene-chewer, allowing Turteltaub the freedom to fill his canvas with vibrant effects. Showing a good eye for grand spectacle, the director brings a dragon to life in a memorable parade scene, conjures villains made of creepy crawly cockroaches, morphs vicious wolves into adorable puppies, and soars over Manhattan's skyline on an iron eagle ripped from the side of the Chrysler Building. The requisite Fantasia tribute -- complete with dancing mops and buckets -- feels forced. But it's not long before Cage is piloting a sports car through a floating mirror, and Apprentice is right back in its turbo-charged, entertain-at-all-costs mode.

It's safe to say that imaginative kids who felt deflated after trudging through M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender will find the movie-making magic tricks they've been waiting for here. Parents may find certain sequences loud and overbearing. That, of course, will make the kids like it even more.

Nicknamed the "French Hitchcock," Henri-Georges Clouzot was responsible for two of France's best post-war pictures, The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques. Yet, not long after his intriguing documentary The Mystery of Picasso, his relevance hit a sharp decline -- even as Hitchcock himself, and the suspense genre in general, became more and more popular.

But now we are suddenly confronted with evidence of what might have been Clouzot's magnum opus in Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea's mesmerizing new documentary hybrid, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno. Sparked by an unexpected meeting between Bromberg and Clouzot's widow in a stalled elevator, the film goes about the task of filling in the gaps between, surrounding, and caused by the 15 hours of footage (mostly rushes and screen tests) that are left of L'Enfer, Clouzot's immensely ambitious and unfinished 1964 production of a psychological-thriller-cum-acid-trip.

Fascinated by Fellini's 8 ½, according to assistant director Costa-Gavras, Clouzot meant to blow out a relatively simple tale of an innkeeper (Serge Reggiani) and his obsessive jealousy over his young wife, Odette (Romy Schneider), with all matter of hallucinatory audio and visual effects. Much of the footage that Bromberg, a film archivist, and Medrea, a lawyer, plumb involves cherry bomb Schneider modeling outfits, smoking and testing reactions under pulsing colored lights, covered in glitter and fluorescent make-up. Enthralled by modern art, Clouzot subjected his imagery to rhythmic zooms, fetishized close-ups, and cascades of visual effects, one of which literally involves a cascade of water rippling over images of Schneider and Reggiani.

What the hell was he up to? Clouzot certainly had a vision of where he wanted L'Enfer to end up and, given an "unlimited budget" by Columbia Pictures, did not want for lack of fiscal security. Rather than studio interference, it was Clouzot's own (denied) pathology that plagued the production. A notorious insomniac, Clouzot would hound his crew at all hours of the night, ran his cast ragged and demanded reshoots at nearly every turn. Following Reggiani's abrupt exit from the film -- the role was briefly recast with Jean-Louis Trintignant -- Clouzot suffered a near-fatal heart attack while shooting an encounter between Schneider and co-star Dany Carrel on a boat, effectively aborting the project.

Indeed, Bromberg and Medrea do a far more chilling and terrifically fascinating job by arranging the remnants of Clouzot's smashed centerpiece, rather than tangling with the beast on a purely narrative level. While adding a soundtrack to several scenes and uncovering Clouzot's own experimental sound tests, the directors also rebuild key scenes via readings, recasting Jacques Gamblin in Reggiani's role and Bérénice Bejo in Schneider's. What sounds like a mess eventually emerges as a daring, fractious dual portrait of pathology run amok and the frustration inherent in attempting to perfectly realize any imagined narrative, whether it be a film or a future with another.  
                
It would be foolish (my kind of foolish) to imagine that Inferno will remind the wider public of Clouzot's admittedly extreme but astonishingly effective talents. More pointedly, Bromberg and Medrea have presented the doomed project as an entity refracted and rearranged through countless perspectives and dismantled parts, getting to the dark heart of the artist's obsession, over 30 years after his death. Compared to Claude Chabrol's tedious 1994 version of L'Enfer, Inferno suggests that certain projects are simply more captivating in their incompleteness.