- LOS ANGELES -- Walt
Disney and Salvador Dali seem the most unlikely of artistic collaborators
- one the embodiment of prim and proper Midwestern values, the other the
quintessential outrageous showman who once vowed to spit on his mother's
portrait.
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- And yet collaborate they did, in 1947, on an animation
short called Destino that was abandoned while still in development. Following
the theft of about 150 storyboards and other assorted bits of artwork that
later turned up on the New York art market, it was assumed to have been
lost for ever.
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- Now their collaboration has come back to life. Thanks
to some assiduous recovery efforts by present and former Disney employees,
and the commitment of Roy Disney, Walt's nephew, Dali's original sketches
and storyboards have been reconstituted and turned into a short film that
has been earning rave reviews.
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- Destino won the prize for best animated short in Melbourne,
and has just been shown at Telluride, in Colorado, in anticipation of its
formal American debut at the New York film festival. It is, as one might
expect from Dali, a head-trip of a film in which images blend and mesh
into each other. It includes images of eyeballs wearing dinner jackets,
a monastery bell tower, the Tower of Babel, a wall eroded by the sands
of time and a ballerina's head that turns into a baseball.
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- Baker Bloodworth, one of the film's producers, admitted
that some of Dali's ideas had to be cut because the restorers found them
"incomprehensible". Although mindful of Dali's admonition - "If
you've understood any of this, I've failed" - they tried to stay true
to his spirit.
-
- Almost more interesting than the film itself is the story
of how it came about. Dali, contrary to what one might expect, regarded
Walt Disney as one of the great film surrealists after seeing Fantasia
and greeted him warmly when he met him at a party in 1945.
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- After Dali completed work on the celebrated dream sequence
in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1946), he and Disney conceived of Destino
- based on a popular Spanish song at the time - as one element in an omnibus
animation film.
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- From the start, however, it was clear that the men had
crucially different notions of where art and commerce should meet.
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- Disney told the press the film would be "just a
simple story about a young girl in search of true love". Dali, on
the other hand, said it was "a magical exposition of the problem of
life in the labyrinth of time" - not a concept the Hollywood publicity
machine was likely to handle too well.
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=445391
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