What is the connection between the Spanish surrealist and the creator of Mickey Mouse?
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Although the Disney imprimatur has become a badge of bland populism, Walt Disney sought to be cutting edge in the studio’s early years. At around the time Dali was designing dream sequences for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, Disney met him at the home of Warner Bros. chief Jack Warner and proposed that the two collaborate.
He had already commissioned Bauhaus abstract painter Oskar Fischinger to work on Pinocchio and Fantasia. “I want to give more big artists such opportunities,” he said. “We need them. We have to keep breaking new ground.”
Dali apparently returned Disney’s admiration. “I have come to Hollywood and am in contact with the three great American Surrealists–the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille, and Walt Disney,” Dali gushed to his friend, Andre Breton.
The result of their collaboration was Destino, a short film intended to be a part of a Disney anthology. Dali incorporated some of his iconic images - the melting clock, the tower of babble, a nightmarish beach, a pyramid with a clock embedded in its base. The animation was set to a Mexican ballad, devoid of dialogue and without a clear story line.
Twenty two paintings and 135 story sketches later, Dali was asked to abandon the project because the anthologies were not box-office money-makers.
Disney’s nephew, Roy Disney, now head of the company’s animation division, decided decades later to revive the project. Production on Destino resumed in May, 2001, at Disney’s Paris animation studio and involved 25 artists. Destino premiered at the Annecy International Animation Festival in June, 2003, almost 60 years after it had begun, attracting favorable attention on the festival circuit.
The friendship between Dali and Disney apparently continued despite the venture’s collapse. Disney’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, recalls how the artist continued to visit her parents’ home where he liked to ride her father’s train. “And although it was the middle of summer, he was dressed in a black overcoat, with a collar and cravat. He sat on a little boxcar with his cane upright in front of him.”
Click here to see a Destino excerpt:
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