DESTINO

Thrown by WB studio head Jack Warner, it was a typical Hollywood party and all the big stars of the 30’s and 40’s were there.  However, it was also the meeting place of two guests, both artistic visionaries in their own right, whose chance encounter would culminate into a project that would eventually take 57 years to complete.  When Walt Disney met Salvador Dalí in 1944, Dalí was designing a sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Spellbound and was known throughout the world as the most influential surrealist artist of the century.  Disney had already had abstract painter and animator Oskar Fischinger work on Pinocchio and Fantasia, and was always on the alert for fine artists who could revolutionize the artistic boundaries of animation.  As Disney states in 1946: “Like the Night on Bald Mountain sequence Kay Nielson designed for Fantasia, I want to give more big artists such opportunities.  We need them.  We have to keep breaking new trails,” and so he does by bringing Dalí onto the Disney lot to design visuals for a short entitled Destino which was originally intended for inclusion in one of Disney’s anthology features, like Make Mine Music. 

Destino or “destiny”, according to Walt Disney is “a simple love story, where boy meets girl.”  Set in a dreamlike setting, it is a poetic expression of the turmoil of love and it is as groundbreaking today as it was intended to be in the 40’s, setting forth to the animation industry the world beyond the imagination, the world of the subconscious. 

Dalí worked night and day on Destino in 1945-1946 producing twenty-two paintings and 135 story sketches for the project, before he was asked to abandon it as the package pictures were financially unsuccessful.  Disney did not think the public would embrace Destino due to the lack of support for the others and it would be an even greater financial loss.

Fifty-seven years later, Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew, instructed producer Baker Bloodworth and director Dominique Monfery to finish Destino.  With the assistance of John Hench who, along with Bob Cormack, assisted Dalí on the original project, the journals of Dalí’s wife Gala Dalí, and a team of 25 animators, they finish Destino, helping it fulfill it’s ‘destiny’.  The completed film includes five of Dalí’s original paintings and is a beautiful blend of Dalí’s surrealist voice with animation featuring operatic-styled music.    

Once completed, Destino premiered on June 2, 2003 at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in Annecy, France.  The film has won many awards and was nominated for a 2003 Academy Award for Animated Short Film.