A bootleg recording of the short feature “Destino,” a forgotten collaboration between Salvador Dalí and Walt Disney Pictures, that I saw this weekend. (Go see the exhibition at MoMA if you haven’t already!) Dalí originally worked with Walt Disney Pictures to produce concepts and storyboards for the five minute short in 1945, but it was shelved for decades until being reimagined and released posthumously in 2003.
A bit unfortunately, the familiar Disney aesthetic saturates the animation, but Dalí’s dark phantasmagoria keeps the film otherworldly. And even if the style is an uncomfortable blend of avant garde and commercial, you can’t resist watching some of Dalí’s extraordinary motifs — crawling ants, the balletic female form, and his trippy, fluid landscapes — come to life in a real “moving picture.”
Strangely, so many of the more iconic oil paintings depict arid, still landscapes that the impatience of Disney’s animation is almost another form of upset to Dalí’s intentions. Wonder what he would have thought about that had he seen the film to completion… either way, the exhibit, and especially this treat of a short film, are worth catching.