In 1946, Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí, in one of cinema's oddest collaborations, teamed up on a short film called Destino. But Disney's studio ran into financial trouble and put the unfinished film on the shelf.
Now, 57 years later, a team of Disney animators has finished what Dalí started. The six-minute film, spearheaded by Walt's nephew Roy E. Disney and producer Baker Bloodworth (Dinosaur), premiered at the Annecy Animation Festival in June and is currently touring festivals worldwide. Recent stops include the Telluride, Montreal and Venice festivals, along with the Melbourne International Film Festival, where it won the grand prize for best short film.
Destino will likely be shown in theaters next year before a Disney feature film, and eventually will be released on DVD.
Though Dalí's admiration for Walt Disney might seem strange today -- for some the name Disney now evokes the opposite of subversive -- the outrageous surrealist painter held the animator and studio chief in high-enough esteem to want to make a movie with him.
"I have come to Hollywood and am in touch with the three great American surrealists -- the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille and Walt Disney," the artist wrote to his friend Andre Breton in 1937.
The remnants of the aborted film include 150 storyboards, drawings and paintings, which have sat for the last half-century in the Disney vaults. Those works were the basis of the new Destino, which combines some of Dalí's iconic images -- the melting clock, the tower of babble, a nightmarish beach, a pyramid with a clock embedded in its base -- and adds motion. Images morph into one another, everything unfolding with a haunting, dreamlike serenity.
