Salvador Dali & Walt Disney: A Destino 58 Years in the Making

If you thought Salvador Dali and Walt Disney had nothing in common except the ‘D’ in their surnames, get prepared to be proven wrong. Destino – a five-minute animated short film was the child of Dali’s feverish imagination and Disney’s singular storytelling. But it’s one of those rare cases where the story behind the film is almost as surreal as the film itself. Welcome to arid plains, vicious eyeballs, melting clocks, unrequited love and a wait that lasted 58 years. Read about a "Destino" 58 years in the making...

“I have come to America and I am in contact with some great American surrealists. One of them is Walt Disney.” Thus wrote Salvador Dali to his dear friend Andre Breton, founder of the surrealist art movement in Paris, in 1937. Now come to think of it, you are used to hear all kinds of adjectives put before the name of the man, but surrealist is not at all what you’d have expected in your most surreal dreams.

Surrealism, as we know, is an expression of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, convention and morality, just like in a real dream. And doesn’t Walt Disney, you would say with furrowed brows, stands for all that is snuggly, cuddly, pretty, cute and go hoppity-hop, just like a celluloid dream? How do the niche repression, depression and decay of Dali find a place in Disney’s mainstream, colour-corrected world aglow with singsong optimism?

The answer must be drama. Both of them had a genuine love for everything that is melodramatic. Dali said, the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous. One of the basic principles of a successful animation, said Walt Disney, was, is and always will be exaggeration. Thus they found an unexpected artistic soulmate in each other.

The year was 1945 and the place was one of the luscious parties of movie mogul Jack Warner. It was the usual vacuous pretties and extravagant tipples till Dali and Disney decided that it’s time they should work together on an animated short feature called Destino. But before the film and the history were made, the cognoscenti had to wait for 58 years.

Destino, Spanish for ‘destiny’, a haunting musical piece of love found and lost by Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez has been in Disney’s mind for long as a perfect background score. The film, Destino, was envisioned by Walt Disney as a simple boy-meets-girl love story. Dali wanted it to be a compendium of all his pictorial themes - the melancholy of space and time, dissolving images, and disturbing Freudian hallucinations.

Thus started the work for Destino in feverish pitch. In between late 1945 and 1946, Dali began arriving at the Disney Studio every morning at eight-thirty and working until five at night. Eight months, twenty seconds of film, twenty-two paintings and one thirty five story sketches into the project, destiny itself took over. The project was declared commercially non-viable in 1947 thanks to a post-World War II economic crunch and other studio commitments. Several attempts to rekindle the project, especially by the chief studio background artist on the job, John Hench, failed. To make matters worse, more than half of the artwork and sketches got mysteriously stolen from the studio.

That was till the year was 1999 and the man was Roy Edward Disney, Walt Disney’s nephew and vice-chairman of the studio. He was working on Fantasia 2000, a much grander rejuvenation of Fantasia 1940, an avant-garde project very close to Walt Disney’s heart that failed miserably at the box office. The original Fantasia was a collection of mini features, set to celebrated classical music pieces. The individual stories was inspired and dictated by the mood and tempo of the music very much like Destino. One the sequences was on a Bette Midler piece, which Roy wanted to base on ‘some’ Dali artwork he found in the studio archives created for ‘some film’ in the past. He contacted the lawyers on whether he could use it. The lawyers told him that they possess it but don't own it. It turned out that the contract between Disney and Dali stipulated that the artwork doesn't become Disney property until after Destino is made.

Destiny again brought a twist in the fate of Destino. This time a favorable one. Roy decided it’s time to present this holy grail of experimental animation to the long awaiting world. Walt Disney Studio, Paris was chosen for the job because of its unique sensitivity to the material (Paris has always been the center of the world for Dali) and Dominique Monfery seemed the most appropriate animator to helm this short project even though he had never directed before. Producer Baker Bloodworth met Monfrey to present him with this lifetime opportunity. What he got in return was a flat no. "'Why would you want to finish a project started by Salvador Dali? Are you insane?" He said in a polite French way. It took Bloodworth two months to convince Monfrey. And thus started the journey to deciphering the scattered, tattered remnants of the original artwork and storyboard, in order to make it as true to the original vision as possible.

The job was anything but easy. The theft and Dali’s unconventional method of sequencing his storyboard made matters worse. Destino was ultimately recut from eight to five minutes because some of it was incomprehensible. After all, Dali had always said about his artwork, “If you understand this, then I've failed.” After much help from Gala Dali, his wife and John Hench, the film was completed. The animation was mostly two-dimensional but in key sequences three-dimensional animation was used to bring alive the plastic quality of Dali’s work. The film premiered in Anncey International Animation Film Festival (Click here) in Annecy, France and had limited theatrical releases with Calendar Girls and The Triplettes of Belleville. It even bagged an Oscar nomination for the best animated short film in 2003. Ironically, Destino is highly profitable today, with lithographs, books, very limited edition artworks, and a DVD slated for release in 2010 with an accompanying documentary. The tides have certainly turned.

Was a fifty-eight year wait for a five-minute film worth it? See it for yourself and decide. When the whirlwind imagination of Dali meets the deep human notes of Disney, you get the one-of-a-kind love story of Chronos, the Greek deity of time, and his ill-fated love for a mortal beauty. And don’t forget to appreciate all the back-story when you gush superlative about it.

Watch the full movie here!