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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JUNE 12, 2015
PARTING SHOT
A weekly snapshot from The Daily Astorian and Chinook Observer photographers
A deer peeks out from the grassy dunes of Long Beach, Wash., on June 2.
JOSHUA BESSEX — The Daily Astorian
ODDITY
Walt Disney’s surrealistic friend
Disney,
Dali shared
fascination with
the fantastic
By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO — It
turns out the man behind
Mickey Mouse liked quirky
cats.
Besides his love of whole-
some entertainment, Walt
Disney also had an apprecia-
tion for the eccentric that led
to a short-lived partnership
and decades-long friendship
with surrealistic artist Salva-
dor Dali.
Although their styles and
personalities were dramati-
cally different, Disney and
Dali shared a fascination with
the fantastic. They brought
their vivid imaginations to-
gether shortly after World
War II to work on an animat-
ed feature called “Destino,”
which wasn’t completed until
long after their deaths.
Even after they aban-
doned “Destino,” the two
artists remained in touch and
even traveled to each other’s
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ries and periodically discuss-
ing plans to make a movie
based on “Don Quixote.”
That dream was never real-
ized. Disney died in 1966.
Dali, who was three years
younger, died in 1989.
The improbable bond
between the mastermind of
Disneyland and the Spanish
painter of reality-bending
images will be explored in
an exhibit running from July
10 through Jan. 3 at the Walt
AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
This 1957 photo released by the Walt Disney Family Foun-
dation shows surrealistic artist Salvador Dali, left, and
Walt Disney at a beach in Spain.
This photo shows a 1957 drawing of Don Quixote by Sal-
vador Dali for Walt Disney inside a copy of Shakespeare’s
“Macbeth,” in a collections room at the Disney museum in
San Francisco.
Disney Family Museum in
San Francisco. It will then
shift to the Dali Museum in
St. Petersburg, Florida.
The exhibit will feature
“Destino” storyboards, let-
ters exchanged between the
two men, photographs, voice
recordings and rarely seen
artwork, including a drawing
of Don Quixote that Dali did
for Disney in 1957 inside a
book, Shakespeare’s “Mac-
beth.”
“This will show an angle
of Walt that people don’t nor-
mally think of — he wasn’t
just all about family-friendly
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Nicolaou, the exhibit’s cura-
tor. “He wasn’t dark, but he
dealt in dreams and fantas-
tical images. He was a man
ready to experiment in any
way possible.”
Dali, a pioneer in Eu-
ography, he sent his copy to
Dali in 1944 seeking an au-
tograph. He also suggested
that Dali work on a piece of
animation to be packaged
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Disney’s 1940 musical, “Fan-
tasia.”
The partnership didn’t
come to fruition until late
1945, shortly after Disney
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time at a Hollywood dinner
party hosted by movie studio
mogul Jack Warner. By that
time, Dali had already com-
pleted some work on a dream
sequence in an Alfred Hitch-
cock movie, “Spellbound.”
Given the a wide range of
choices in Disney’s vast mu-
sic library, Dali decided to
set his animation to a Span-
ish ballad called “Destino”
because the title resonated
with his interest in desti-
Walt Disney Family Foundation via AP
rope’s surrealistic movement,
thought Disney might be a
kindred spirit when he saw
some of Disney’s early an-
imation in the “Silly Sym-
phony” series that ran from
1929 through 1939. Nicolaou
said a “Silly Symphony” skit
featuring dancing skeletons
particularly appealed to Dali,
whose paintings of melting
clocks, apparitions, monsters
and other creatures often bor-
der on the hallucinogenic.
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ifornia in 1937, Dali sought
out another artist whom he
considered to be a master in
surrealism — the comedian
Harpo Marx. He also saw
surrealistic undertones in the
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er Cecil B. DeMille.
Disney had become in-
trigued with Dali, too. After
reading the artist’s autobi-
ny. Disney assigned one of
his most trusted animators,
John Hench, to assist Dali on
“Destino.”
While working with
Hench to produce more than
200 storyboards and sketch-
es for “Destino,” Dali strug-
gled to come up with a plot
that made sense to Disney.
The two men’s differenc-
es began to crystallize in a
1946 interview when they
were asked about their vi-
sions for “Destino.” Dali
described it as “a magical
exposition of life in the lab-
yrinth of time” while Disney
saw it as “a simple love story
— boy meets girl.”
Their differences widened
when Dali began to insert
sketches of baseball players
into “Destino.” Exasperat-
ed that about $70,000 had
already had been spent on a
project that didn’t seem to be
progressing, Disney decided
to scrap it.
“It got a little too wild for
Walt, so he quietly pulled
the plug,” Nicolaou says. “I
think Dali was embarrassed
and hurt by it.”
The professional split ap-
parently didn’t damage Da-
li’s friendship with Disney.
During the 1950s, Dali visit-
ed Disney’s home, where he
rode Disney’s model train,
“the Lilly Belle.” Later Dis-
ney and his wife, traveled to
see Dali and his wife, Gala,
at their home in Port Lligat,
Spain.
“Destino” was finally fin-
ished in 2003 after Walt’s
nephew, Roy, hired French
director Dominique Mon-
fery to complete what Dali
left behind with the help of
computers. Hench, then in
his 90s, also helped anima-
tors figure out where Dali
was initially headed with the
story.
The adaptation includes
Dali-esque images of plants
with eyeballs, ants morphing
into beret-wearing men on
bicycles and a ballerina re-
moving her head to throw at
a baseball player wielding a
bat.
“Destino” was nominat-
ed for an Academy Award in
2004 for best animated short
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Nicolaou says the piece de-
serves recognition for “in-
crementally expanding our
vision of who Walt Disney
was.”
• Online: “Destino:”
http://tinyurl.com/of8legq;
Walt Disney Family Museum:
http://www.waltdisney.org/;
The Dali Museum: http://
thedali.org/
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