In 2003, Disney released a six minute animated short called Destino, finally bringing closure to a project that began 57 years earlier. The collaboration between Dalí and Disney was formalized in a work contract signed on the 14 January 1946 and set to last for two months. At that time, Dalí worked regularly at the Disney Studios in Burbank, California, creating the drawings for Destino. Two other Disney collaborators, John Hench and Bob Cormack, also took part in the process, and with them Dalí conceived and worked on the pictures that were to illustrate the love story portrayed in the film. But then, rather abruptly, the project was tabled when The Walt Disney Company ran into financial problems.
Recreated from 17 seconds of original animation and storyboards drawn by Dalí, the film shows us what Dalí and Disney’s planned project might have looked like. It provides an almost perfect symbiosis of the two creators’ sensibilities, with Walt Disney’s Fantasia-like flights smoothly animating Dalí’s fluid dream imagery.
The source of inspiration for this Dalí-Disney project was the Mexican song by Armando Domínguez entitled Destino. Its words lent substance to the plot of the film, while the music accompanied the images throughout. Destino, through cartoon, set out to recount and stress the importance of time as we wait for destiny to act on our lives. The love story between the dancer and the baseball-player-cum-god Cronos is the guiding strand through which we are shown the many ups-and-downs we have to experience before destiny makes its appearance.
Destino becomes a unique artistic product in which Dalinian expressiveness is combined with Disney’s fantasy and sonority, making it a film in which Dalí’s images take on movement and Disney’s figures become ‘Dalinised.’” Can you just imagine these two cultural icons working together? Maybe this is that moment that I would choose to be at if I only could…
Salvador Dalí, Walt Disney, Gala and Lilian Disney in Portlligat, 1957