Sixty years on, Dali's take on Disney is screened
CoastalWader
MIKE WADE
Mw...@scotsman.com
A GIRL turns into a dandelion, a naked cyclist rides past and ants rampage over
the screen - nearly 60 years after they met, a film by Walt Disney and Salvador
Dali has finally been screened.
The fruits of their collaboration, a seven-minute animation entitled Destino,
was premiered this week at a cartoon film festival in Annecy, south-east
France.
The film is based around a finished 17-second sequence, which was completed
when Dali, the surrealist artist, worked briefly at the Disney studios in
Hollywood. The remainder of the short film has been pieced together from
sketches and storyboards produced before the project was finally abandoned in
1947.
Festival director Serge Bromberg said the film had given Disney back "a bit of
its history", adding the project would have been completed decades before if
there had been sufficient finance.
The unlikely relationship between the Catalan artist and the US cartoonist is
thought to date from Dali’s arrival in America during the Second World War.
His subsequent relationship with the Disney studios is one of a number of
encounters the artist had with the US film industry.
During this period Dali designed a Freudian dream sequence for Alfred
Hitchcock’s 1945 thriller Spellbound and earlier he collaborated with the
Marx Brothers.
The scenario for the Disney-Dali film is certainly surreal. Intended as part of
a larger feature, like the 1940 film, Fantasia, it was a love story told with
baseball imagery to the accompaniment of a Mexican ballad.
Two Disney stalwarts, John Hench and Bob Cormack, were assigned to work with
Dali and turn his inspiration into workable animation.
There was, however, only a vague idea of a plot, with the ideas tending towards
a mood piece following the themes of love, hate, time and destiny.
Though abandoned early in its life, the project serves as a reminder that
Disney was once a cutting-edge artist. Nor was he a stranger to surrealism, as
a pink elephant sequence in Dumbo and the "Toccata and Fugue" section of
Fantasia demonstrated.
Working with Dali proved to be easy for Disney. The artist reported to the
studio promptly at 9:30 every morning and spent all day at his artwork almost
as a regular employee.
However, Dali insisted on working with his own media. Offered the standard
animators’ paper, which had a three-hole punch at the foot of the page, Dali
refused, saying it "already had a design".
The failure of the project is shrouded in mystery. However, some observers
believe that Dali’s more extreme style and ideas may have been too much for
Disney’s midwestern sensibilities. The two men, however, remained good
friends afterwards and continued to visit in each other’s home countries.
Other Disney projects of the post-war era which never made the screen included
animated versions of Hiawatha and Don Quixote.
One former Disney employee has said he was involved in an animated version of
JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, in which the part of the confused teenager
Holden Caulfield, was played by a dog.
Kerry
It's all relatively relative