In the late 1990's, researchers working in the Disney 'morgue' – where drawings, design concepts and scripts for the studio's projects were stored – made a startling discovery: an aborted collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali.
For several months between 1945 and 1946, the surrealist painter had worked at the studio, developing ideas for a short film called Destino, based around Armando Dominguez's song of the same name. However, Walt killed the project and it was forgotten for over 40 years.
Executive producer Roy E. Disney took the materials to French director Dominique Monféry in 1999, hoping he could conjure a coherent story out of the drawings and notes Dali and studio employee John Hench had left behind. The resulting 6-minute short was released in 2003 to widespread acclaim, winning 6 awards at various film festivals and earning an Oscar nomination. It's currently offered as an extra feature on the Fantasia/Fantasia 2000 Blu-Ray set.
Salvador Dali and Walt Disney Collaborated on 2003 Animated Short Destino
While the idea of these artists collaborating seems shocking, it made a lot of sense. Walt Disney loved European art and was well aware of the current trends. His studio was his family and he encouraged his employees to learn hobbies like sculpture and, yes, piano playing in addition to their duties.
Even as far back as his Silly Symphonies shorts, Disney was pushing animation – considered the province of racy humour – into the territory of High Art. Emboldened by the success of Snow White and undeterred by Fantasia's box office failure, Walt wanted to give the medium of animation the respect he felt it deserved. Until the 1941's Animators' Strike exposed Disney's right-wing tendencies, the European avant-garde returned the sentiment, analyzing his features and shorts with the same fervour they gave works by Man Ray or Picasso.
Salvador Dali was looking for a new challenge after conquering the European art world, making films like Un Chien Andalou with Luis Buñuel, and establishing himself in America's avant-garde. Immune to the developing fissure between what influential art critic Clement Greenberg called High Art (abstract, expressionist, politically-oriented) and 'kitsch' (the opiate of the masses), Dali wanted to further marry surrealism's concepts with cinema . . . and snag a few dollars in the process.
Dali met Disney in 1946 at a party put on by Jack Warner and the two men immediately hit it off. Dali was at the peak of his powers during this time, ideas and images pouring off his pen. Pairing Dali with draftsman John Hench was an inspired move: Hench grounded the often-flighty artist and he aped his style so fluently that even Dali's widow Gala was unable to determine who drew what.
Despite the project's merits, the two men couldn't develop a coherent concept: the most they could conceive was a vague notion of Cronos falling in love with a mortal woman, and baseball as a metaphor for human existence. Disney and Dali weren't even close to a consensus: the studio head called it, "just a simple love story - boy meets girl" while the surrealist claimed it was "a magical exposition on the problem of life in the labyrinth of time."
Destino was more in tune with the aborted Fantasia project, and Walt's attention was more drawn towards more story-based ideas like Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Dali was paid off and told to go home, the project placed on indefinite hiatus.
Destino's Revival: Roy E. Disney and Dominique Monféry Bring the Short to Life
By the 1990's, Fantasia had finally been recognized as a masterpiece and feature-length animation was a high priority. Perhaps too high: CEO Michael Eisner expected every animated film to match The Lion King's $784 million haul. Subsequent movies became more formulaic as Eisner tried to replicate that 1994 movie's success, and he ironically undercut their chances by developing the infamous 'dreck to video' sequels of previous hits.
Roy E. Disney was determined to keep the animation renaissance going. Realizing that Fantasia was popular on home video, he decided the time was right to put together a sequel to the 1940 masterpiece. Making Destino was another way of trying to push the boundaries of what the public considered Disney Animation.
Destino a Fascinating Artifact From Another Period
This film is a Dali painting brought to life, a seamless combination of cel and computer-generated animation to tell the tale of a mortal woman falling in love with Cronos and convincing him to love her back. Much like Un Chien Andalou, Destino uses a free-associative style of storytelling, switching points of view and situations at a moments' notice.
Like Andy Warhol or Seth MacFarlane, Dali mastered a few artistic gestures and recycled them throughout his career, and most of them – objects and people transforming when seen from different angles, elephants and telephones (Dali considered the latter highly sexual) and ants emerging from a human hand (also used in Un Chien Andalou) – are on display in Destino. It's questionable how much of this was actually from Dali, or from director Monféry paying tribute to the famed surrealist but the constant repetition does get wearing.
Overall, Destino is an impressive display of what two artistic geniuses working together could achieve; but it's not really more than the sum of its parts.
Dominic von Riedemann - Dominic is the Animated Film Feature Writer, and winner of 11 Suite 101 Editors' Choice Awards.
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