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In 1937, Salvador Dali wrote to his dear friend Andre Breton, founder of the surrealist art movement in Paris, and said, “I have come to America and I am in contact with three great American surrealists – the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille, and Walt Disney.” Breton envisioned Surrealism as an art form that would draw its content from the unexplored realm of the subconscious human mind, ferreting out unparalleled honesty and otherworldly images that would turn the world’s concept of art on its head. In such total abandon, Breton and others believed the world would find absolute freedom. By the 1930s, Surrealism, a stepchild of Dadaism (anti-art), had exploded into the vanguard art scene in Europe with artists such as Man Ray, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Wassily Kandinski, Miro and Salvador Dali. Soon, Surrealist influence began to stretch across the Atlantic sea into the United States, where artists Andre Masson, Marcel Duchamp and Arshile Gorky had already emigrated by the mid 1920s. But to many, America's first great surrealist artists were animation pioneers: Walt Disney, Max Fleischer, and Tex Avery. Walt Disney found an unexpected artistic soul mate in Salvador Dali, who he may have met as early as 1937. “We have to keep breaking new trails,” Disney said at the time. “Ordinarily good story ideas don’t come easily and have to be fought for. Dali is communicative. He bubbles with ideas.” At a dinner party held by movie mogul Jack Warner in 1945, the concept of collaboration between Disney and Dali began to evolve. Disney had been compiling short features for theatrical release. “Destino” was the name of a Mexican ballad that Disney had envisioned as a vehicle for a musical short film project. Dali was attracted to Destino’s title and the concept of destiny attracting two lovers. In late 1946, Dali began arriving at the Disney Studio every morning at eight-thirty and working until five at night. Twenty seconds of film, several paintings, various pen-and-ink drawings and many storyboards came out of this eight-month period during which Dali was an employee of Walt Disney Studios. He hinted in his own newsletter, Dali News, that the collaborative film effort would “offer to the world the first vision of ‘psychological relief’.” Then, destiny itself took over, and the project was put on hold by Disney in 1947 as a result of post-World War II changes and other studio commitments. In 1999, Roy Disney, Walt Disney’s nephew, became inspired to finish “Destino” after the release of “Fantasia 2000” – a film richly laden with outlandish, surrealistic imagery that was no doubt influenced in part by Surrealism. Now fully realized and invigorated with the help of 3D computer technology, the new “Destino” project was kept as close as possible to the original vision laid out by Disney and Dali in 1946. Director Domonique Monfery and producer Baker Bloodworth utilized many traditional techniques of animated filmmaking as well as cutting-edge technology to emulate what they termed the “plastic quality” of Dali’s multi-dimensional imagery. Fifty-seven years later, the brainchild of Dali and Disney was finally born. “Destino” is, according to the curator of the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, “the perfect combination of Dali and Disney”.
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