Destino - Experimental Disney Film That Took 58 Years to Make

Published by Reblogs - Credits in Posts, May 29th, 2023

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Destino: The Experimental Disney Film That Took 58 Years to Make

By Nathan Williams

Published May 19, 2023

The weird wholesomeness of the Disney-Dali friendship lingered on long after their contract ended, Destino one ember that could not be snuffed out.

Walt Disney Animation Studios
Walt Disney Pictures

Outside of mustache maintenance tips, it’s hard to see what common ground Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali and cartoon mogul Walt Disney could possibly hope to find.

Upon schlepping his easel, exotic pets, and political baggage onto American shores, Dali mentioned in a letter in 1937, "I have come to Hollywood and am in contact with three great American Surrealists — the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille, and Walt Disney." No one is sure if he was joking or not, as he was not actually in contact with Disney for many years. Harpo Marx? That seems way more likely. But Dali also walked an anteater on a leash with a straight face, so it’s hard to know what he was thinking. Working with a guy who catered to kids might have been exactly the counter-intuitive decision that he savored, much in the Alice Cooper singing on The Muppets variety.

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Irrespective of Dali’s thought process, soon the painter of dreamlike imagery and dismembered body parts would join forces with the man who made children’s shorts about a grinning rodent. Unfortunately, their film never did see completion, each moving onto to bigger and better things, forgetting all about the movie that made them friends. The weird wholesomeness of the Disney-Dali friendship lingered on long after their contract ended, Destino one ember that could not be snuffed out.

Unlikely Bedfellows

According to the current rights holder, Dali deemed Walt the premiere surrealist artist and the two immediately developed a close friendship. As part of the in-development abstract movie not unlike the earlier film Fantasia, Disney proposed that the Spanish provocateur doodle some sketches for his segment of the cartoon. For their collaboration, they chose the Mexican folk song to base that part of the movie, to be named Destino.

Dali, the mind behind The Persistence of Memory (the melting clocks alluding to The Theory of Relativity), the demented short film Un Chien Andalou (don’t Google this if you are at work), Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (his horrific surrealist response to the Spanish Civil War, predating Picasso’s Guernica), and Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time (don’t ask), wasn’t the obvious choice for America’s go-to animator.

If the stories are correct, Disney was rather sanitized and conservative and did not have a sense of humor when it came to suggestive art nor loose morals. Dali had both. But the two hit it off, Disney impressed with his feverish imagination, and Dali seeing the medium as the ideal way to bring his fantastic visions to life, live-action special effects still being in its infancy. To be even more frank, stop-motion sucked. Sorry, King Kong fans. The two men, while vastly different in temperament and style, deep down respected each other as pioneering artists, two kids who rose from the cultural backwater to dominate their fields, rubbing it in the noses of those that sneered at them

Art on the Back Burner

The Walt Disney Co

Disney contacted the surrealist and commissioned him to work on a segment around the time of WWII. The short film, Destino, dragged on so long, it never made it to the feature release. The project stalled at the storyboard stage, neither the Spaniard nor Disney living to see it come to fruition, the specifics of which never being clear. In the intervening years, Dali would contribute to other films (Hitchcock’s Spellbound), and flirt with movie stardom (cast in the aborted Alejandro Jodorowsky film Dune in the role of Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV), and make due with TV appearances for economy-budget car commercials, never needing to worry about paying for mustache wax.

Disney didn’t do much — except inaugurate the two most popular tourist attractions on the planet, Disney World and Disneyland. Their rendezvous in the mid-forties teased what could have been an intriguing relationship, but they sought out more practical, money-making endeavors instead, keeping up the friendship but never actually completing anything as a duo. Later work by both artists, while undeniably profitable, lacked the daring of earlier projects. Destino, lost in the storage closets of Disney, passed into the books as a footnote.

The Persisting Memory

Walt Disney Animation Studios
Walt Disney Pictures

The storyboards created by Dali and Disney Studio artist John Hench remained the only proof of the interaction of the two entities. Of the 200 sketches, a quarter of these preliminary doodles were stolen, damaged, thrown out, or otherwise lost over the years from the archive. An attempt to bring the drawings to life eventually resulted in the fully-realized 2004 animated short, thanks to Executive Producer Roy Disney.

What is the thing about? Dali told LA press back in the 40s, that the collaboration was a "a magical exposition of life in the labyrinth of time." His cryptic jumble of thoughts undercut by Disney, who simply called Destino a love story. The two artists interpreted the project their own way, while not stifling the other. Though they remained lifelong friends and mutual admirers, one wonders if the clash of styles accounts for why they never actually completed a single film together in twenty years, both desiring to have complete artistic control.

So, why did this really happen? At the time of their meeting, Americans who were in the know were too big of snobs to ever stoop to watch a Disney cartoon. Disney knew this, and wanted to be taken seriously. Art critics were as pretentious as ever, and were more busy psychoanalyzing splotches of color and abstract series of lines. And maybe that’s why Dali relished the chance so much, it was his own chance to make the most transgressive and abhorrent thing for any self-respecting surrealist artist: a family movie. The bonus being that he got to reach the widest audience, infecting the minds of a whole new swath of normal, innocent people.

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