Many years ago, in one of my numerous books dealing with Disney animated features and shorts, I read about what sounded like a truly extraordinary collaboration, between Walt Disney and a very different but equally iconic, imaginative artist – the Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali.
In the mid-1940s, Disney and Dali had begun working together upon a cartoon short entitled Destino, but, tragically, by the end of the 1940s this very exciting, groundbreaking project had been abandoned, and thereafter it had been left in incomplete form to gather dust within the Disney vaults – or at least that was still the sad situation when I first learnt about Destino during the late 1970s or early 1980s.
Imagine my surprise and delight, then, when a few years ago I discovered that after around 60 years Destino had finally been returned to by the Disney studio and completed. Directed by Dominique Monféry, and with a running time of 6.5 minutes, it received its official debut in 2003 when screened at an international film festival, and was even nominated for an Academy Award in 2004 for Best Animated Short Film. Moreover, it was now viewable in its complete form on YouTube!
Needless to say, as a massive fan of both Disney and Dali, I lost no time in watching Destino there, and have rewatched it several times since. I have also purchased the official Disney Editions book Dali and Disney: Destino, written by David Bossert and published in 2015, which documents its creation and lengthy history, and is lavishly illustrated throughout by stunning artwork and preliminary sketches.
As might be expected, Destino is certainly very strange, weird even, but also incredibly beautiful, and filled with characteristic Daliesque images, from melting clocks and swarms of ants to eerie statues and grotesque faces, all brought faithfully to life by the animation genius of Disney, and also accompanied by a suitably haunting Armando Dominguez ballad sung by celebrated Mexican chanteuse Dora Luz. Yet what else could such a collaboration possibly yield?
However, Destino is not strange or weird in a bad way – on the contrary, it is genuinely mesmerising to watch, even though I confess to having had no idea whatsoever about what its storyline was supposed to mean or convey when I watched it for the first time [on 29 November 2018]. (I later learnt that it apparently represents the doomed love affair between the immortal Chronos (Time) and Dahlia, a mortal woman.) But who cares anyway – because both visually and aurally this is truly a mini-masterpiece of art, wholly unlike anything else that I have ever seen in the field of animation.
Incidentally, following on from their feature-length multi-segment animated movies Fantasia and Fantasia 2000, there were plans at Disney to create a third one, Fantasia 2006, with Destino earmarked as one of its segments. Three brand-new segments had also been created for it - click here for details - before, sadly, the project was cancelled. One of these completed sengments, One By One, can be viewed here on YouTube, and is truly inspirational.
As for Destino: if you too enjoy Disney and/or Dali,
but have never seen or perhaps have never even known about Destino before, you're missing an absolute treat, but you can soon
do something about that, because here it is,
for your delectation and delight – Destino. And click here to watch a rare documentary about the unique Disney/Dali collaboration that led to Destino (though at the time of this documentary's release, Destino itself had not been completed).
[This review's earlier, shorter version was originally written by me on 29 November 2018.]
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Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly
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