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When Disney met Dali

Packed away in a storage box somewhere in Southern California is a tiny spool of color film barely 15 seconds long that is unique in the history of 20th century art. It shows two bizarre figures, humanoid heads deformed by "persuasive and triumphant madness" dali quotemounted upon the backs of tortoises. As they converge, the space between them takes on the shape of a bell that turns into a ballerina. In the last moment, her head abruptly becomes a baseball that disappears into the bleak, mountainous Catalonian landscape.

This 53-year-old snippet of nitrate film is all that remains from a forgotten animation project called Destino, a curious collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney that was never completed. The reasons Destino ("destiny" in Spanish) was never finished remained undiscovered for over five decades, until sometime after the death of my father, Tom Jones, in 1992. In a gloomy attic in the Loire Valley, where my father lived for five years, my brother and I discovered among his papers a collection of notes, never-seen-before negatives, and old photographs he had retrieved over many years as Disney's publicity agent. They triggered memories of my father talking about this project when I was growing up and of the evening he took me into Walt Disney's office to see the portrait of Jupiter, a painting Dali did for Destino. I realized that the small trove we had found in France proved that a completed Destino would have been a sensation by any measure, a cinematic revolution using techniques way ahead of their time.

Compelled to clear up the mystery, I started calling anyone who might have had any information. Steered toward former Disney employees and Dali acolytes - some now in their 90s - my research progressed slowly, until one day the phone rang. It was John Hench, calling from California. Now an elderly senior vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering, at the time of the Destino project he was a Disney artist who worked in high-level capacities on a number of films, including Fantasia and Dumbo.

For Destino, he was assigned to coach Dali in Disney's animation technique. Dali at the time described Hench as the "spectral silhouette, who knows better than Dali or Disney the technical secrets of the film."

Excited that someone was finally interested in Destino, Hench decided to reveal the film's mysteries and provided fascinating insight into one of the weirdest partnerships ever produced by Hollywood's golden age. Salvador Dali often said that his destiny was to "save painting from the nihilism of modern art." The man he chose in 1946 to help him bring his tortured surrealist visions to the wide screen was none other than the avuncular creator of Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney.

According to Hench, Disney's finances in 1946 were precarious. Ever since 1940, when the Bank of America shut down Disney's credit line after the animated concert feature Fantasia proved a box-office disaster, Disney struggled with an ever-mounting debt. To save his studio, in time he would be forced to accept an interest-free loan from billionaire Howard Hughes. Not even the success a year later of Dumbo, a brilliant 64-minute cartoon about a flying baby elephant, could make up for the loss of Disney's European markets when World War II started. The studio also suffered setbacks on the home front during the war years; it was practically taken over by the armed forces, churning out training films and designing comical insignia for aircraft. Many were services for which Disney was never paid and from which the studio was still recovering financially.

He decided that "omnibus" films - different short subjects packaged into feature-length films - seemed less of a gamble. Disney, always alert to opportunities, could always break the film up and release the sequences separately and recoup the investment, because shorts in those days preceded most films in theaters.

Eventually, perhaps out of desperation, Disney decided to draw big-name artists and authors to the studio. "Box office will follow quality," Disney was often quoted as saying to nervous money men. Or just maybe, a collaboration with a celebrated painter or author would placate the banks and his financial czar, elder brother Roy O. Disney. And he just might manage to keep his studio going.

Almost by chance, (Disney avoided Hollywood parties, preferring to don an engineer's cap and chug around his estate on a scale-model railroad) he was introduced to Salvador and Gala Dali by Jack Warner at the movie mogul's home one night in late 1945. The Dalis were staying with the Warners while the surrealist superstar painted their portraits. Somehow, Walt Disney, who had founded an empire based on wholesome, Midwestern family values, and Salvador Dali, who once vowed to "spit on the portrait of my mother," hit it off, and a peculiar friendship of long standing was begun.

The match might not have been as odd as it at first seemed. For all his wholesomeness, Disney had been fascinated by avant-garde techniques and began experimenting with them in 1939. Critics praised Fantasia's toccata-and-fugue sequence as reminiscent of Kandinsky and Miro. Hench supervised this sequence using abstract images for the first time in a Disney film.

So a certain groundwork was already laid for the future partnership. Out of admiration for each other's accomplishments, they quickly struck a deal, with Dali agreeing to work on a project for Disney's studio. When the two met, Dali had just managed to complete his first Hollywood assignment, a dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, which producer David O. Selznick had summoned him to create. With greater respect for the film medium, Dali moved his easel to Disney's Burbank studios in 1946.

Since neither knew at the beginning what form their curious partnership would take, the project remained top secret for a while. That is, until Disney commissioned the Catalan painter to prepare a six-minute sequence combining animation with live dancers and special effects in a larger Fantasia-like film. Disney originally intended to use "Destino," a romantic ballad by Mexican composer Armando Dominguez, in a short musical number featuring South American singer and dancer Dora Luz. But the word Destino sent Dali into raptures, and he began creating wild, imaginative pictures to illustrate his emotions.

As for the plot, it varied considerably, depending on which of the two men was doing the telling. "A magical exposition of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time," Dali expounded in his own publication, "Dali News."

"Just a simple story about a young girl in search of true love," Disney modestly described it.

Dali quickly adapted to studio routine, parking his noted eccentric behavior outside. For over two months, he arrived punctually each day at 9:30 a.m. and worked diligently at his easel. Dali often lunched with Disney and Hench in the studio's Coral Room executive restaurant or visited with studio employees, chatting in his own language, an impenetrable mixture of French, Spanish, Catalan, and broken English. His wife and muse, Gala, frequently accompanied him to the studio to inspire, interpret, or just keep an eye on her husband. When she was there, he was even more productive, creating designs to fit the pre-recorded sound track.

Working out of a third-floor atelier in the old Animation Building at Disney Studios, Dali and Hench were indeed forging a completely new animation technique, the cinematic equivalent of Dali's "paranoid critique." This method, which has little connection with its title, is greatly inspired by Freud's work on the subconscious and seeks to insert hidden double images in the artwork. Dali would present an image that a viewer would recognize as one thing, and then slowly force the viewer to recognize alien shapes in the image, which would eventually reveal something else.

"We all know that D.W. Griffith invented everything in motion pictures," reminisces John Hench. "But Dali fashioned an entirely new method that nobody had really ever thought about. Imagine a shot of two skiers in the snow. Nothing very startling about that. Just a pair of skiers. Then a panorama stops on a snowy hill. Nothing shows that the scene has changed, it's only that the skiers are out of the shot. Then the camera pulls back, and only now do we see the complete image. It's a nude, the naked hips of a woman! The substitution has been introduced very early in the sequence, but the eye continues to distinguish snow, maybe recognizing feminine forms, until finally it must admit that there is a woman and nothing else."

No one else had ever worked like that - combining surrealist art and animation. At the time, film as an art medium was not on the agenda. Most movies were simple cornball stories that in the best cases became classics, such as Casablanca, but many were unmemorable. Disney was trying to break out of the "kiddie" straitjacket and make "his" animation an art form. Of course, with Destino's shelving, his chance to achieve this recognition was gone forever. Destino would have broken the mold.

Driving up to Dali's Monterey, California, studio, adjacent to the old Del Monte Lodge Hotel, one day in 1946, Hench found him dictating the script to Gala, who was handwriting the manuscript. Becoming more and more enthusiastic about this form of art-in-motion, Hench says Dali told him, "Animation enhances art; its possibilities are limitless."

As he plotted Destino in his free-form fashion to fit the Dominguez song, a cryptic scenario appeared, depicting Dali's ideas about love and what time does to it. The Gala-Salvador script describes how Destino lovers would be played by live ballet dancers flitting across Daliesque landscapes scattered with shattered statuary, telephones, seashells, and coins. They are struggling against time, in the form of a giant sundial that emerges from the great stone face of Jupiter, who determines the course of all human affairs.

Disney kept an eye on the work in progress, and, being an admirer of Dali's talent, was enthusiastic about the new look he was bringing to animation. So, once the storyboards were finished, Dali and Hench prepared the famous 15-second "pencil test," a kind of animated rough draft of the film.

"Salvador was back in Monterey, so once I finished filming the test, I drove up to show it to him," Hench remembers. "I tipped the manager of this little theater that was showing some B Western to show it after the film was over and the audience had left. The lights went out, and Salvador saw his artwork in full motion. He loved it. Just then the projectionist came out and practically roared, `What was that?' Dali and I looked at each other, and we both knew that it was a unique moment in art."

Disney decided to celebrate in his own way. One Sunday, he invited Dali and Hench to his Holmby Hills home above Brentwood, where the scale-model steam railroad called the Carolwood Pacific circled his estate. He never pretended to understand all of the artist's symbolism, for he realized that was part of Dali's mystique. However, he couldn't resist inviting top animator Ward Kimball, a pioneer of experimental forms of animation and creator of Jiminy Cricket, to pilot the creator of paranoid critique around the half-mile train line. "Along with the usual profusion of Daliana, Dali has conceived of using, for the first time, I believe, American baseball as a ballet form," Disney said that day.

It must have started sounding terribly way out for Walt's brother Roy O., whose business acumen never lost sight of the company's loyal but unsophisticated family audience. Would the Midwest public or the starchy theater owners really accept a Walt Disney cartoon of a woman with snails for feet and a toy car for a head? But perhaps this is only one of the reasons the project never reached the screen or the huge audience Dali envisioned. By late 1946, Disney called a halt to Destino, with regret, because his releasing agency felt the market for omnibus films was exhausted. Although Dali was disappointed, he was optimistic that in the future he and Disney could collaborate on something else or even revive Destino. Though this never came about, they did remain friends, and Disney visited Dali's home on Spain's Costa Brava after the artist returned there in 1949.

It seems Disney did hope to pick Destino up later on, and he was never one to give up easily. With his wife, Lillian, he visited Dali's villa off and on during the '50s to discuss an animated Inferno sequence after the Italian government had commissioned Dali to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy. Later, they discussed an animated Don Quixote, which Dali had recently illustrated, and even a live-action El Cid, which would star Errol Flynn.

Almost 10 years after he stopped production of Destino, Disney was preparing for his renowned "Art of Animation" museum exhibition and casually dropped by the studio archives to check on the Dali background paintings and other Destino artwork. He thought the work done would add another dimension to the exhibit and silence forever his critics among the intellectual community.

My father had only just joined the studio publicity department and was there when Disney made a startling discovery: Virtually all of the major Dali art, including the portfolio of 375 drawings for the pencil test, had disappeared from the studio morgue. Despite urgent appeals to return the missing art, no questions asked, there was no response. Fifty years later, Kimball says Disney had been lackadaisical, "to say the least," to put the Dali art in an unprotected or unmonitored place. "Some of the artists were just waiting to get their hands on them."

When Disney produced his animated version of Alice in Wonderland, now influenced by his association with Dali, he brightened the film with imaginative surrealist touches. When Dali phoned Disney from New York to congratulate him on his latest triumph and try to revive interest in Destino, Disney didn't have the heart to tell him that some of his artwork had been stolen, and he changed the subject.

Sometime after Disney's death, in December 1966, chief archivist Dave Smith appealed to all Disney employees to donate any Disneyana they had. As mysteriously as the five major Dali paintings had disappeared, they reappeared, but no place of honor was accorded them. The conservative post-Walt management had them cleaned and hung in the archives storeroom, far from public view. At about the same time, says Robert Descharnes, an avant-garde filmmaker and photographer who was Dali's right-hand man, a New York-based appraiser and archivist, Albert Field, approached Dali in the Old King Cole bar of the St. Regis, in New York, and showed him some unsigned, newly discovered artwork from Destino. But Dali couldn't distinguish the drawings by John Hench from his own work, so he signed them all.

Ever since then, authentic unsigned Destino drawings on Disney's special animation paper by Dali or Hench occasionally turn up on the art market. But according to Descharnes, the foremost authenticator of Dali art for the auction house Christie's, an enterprising and talented crook has faked Dali signatures on some of the unsigned originals, and the same individual has painted phony Destino artwork which is even for sale on the Internet.

Over many years, my father became fascinated by the story of the mysterious film project and began to interest me with it as well. Little by little, he managed to assemble the few available fragments of the Destino project into a file that one day he hoped could serve as the basis of a book celebrating the surrealist adventure of these two titans of 20th-century art and cinema. When I was growing up in Southern California, I, too, knew that "they" were there. Somewhere in the Walt Disney studio vaults is still a fortune in "unwanted" paintings by Salvador Dali. They have never been appraised and have certainly never been exhibited.

They are all that remain of Destino.