Destino (Disney and Dalí short)

[llavachek]

Please, PLEASE - does anyone know anything about Destino's dvd release? I've heard rumors about Disney releasing it along with a documentary outlining it's creation....
Anyone know??? This movie, if you saw it, was fantastic - definately one to own!!!

[Jeremy]

I've been waiting this one, too. But it seems that Disney can't decide when to release it and what would be the movie to release it with. I don't think that they'll release Destino alone, but as an extra with some animated film.

[FantasiaMan]

I think Destino probably will be released in the Disney Treasures Series, most likely it will be on Disney Rarities Vol. 2 (whenever that will be)

[blackcauldron85]

There are a bunch of "Destino" threads, but I figured I'd post this in this one.

I've been extremely interested in "Destino" for years, even writing school reports about it. I had only ever seen short clips of it. Until now. In the chat room, we started talking about "Destino", and Mason found the whole short on YouTube!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6WCpoWdpCw

I love it! It's definitely different, but it's wonderful!!! A big thanks to Mason for finding it! I'm surprised that Disney hasn't taken it down yet, but I'm so pleased that they haven't!

*edit*
I just realized that Mason posted the link in the Fantasia PE thread...I'll leave this post in this thread, though, because it is "Destino" related, and someone may find the link here who isn't going to read the Fantasia thread...

[TheSequelOfDisney]

Wow, I just watched it and I really really like it! The thing is, I don't fully understand what it means. Nonetheless, I still really enjoyed it. It's very unique and different.

[Jack Skellington]

I haven't seen this much nudity in a Disney film.

[roswellian]

I haven't seen this yet but I'm a huge Dali fan so I'm very interested about when this is going to be released on dvd. I just wiki'd it and the page mentions that it probably won't be included in a Treasures set. That sucks.

[stewie15]

"In conjunction with these releases, Destino, the unfinished animated feature film created by Walt Disney and famed surrealist painter Salvador Dali will release. Begun in 1946, it was rediscovered in 2003 and completed by Walt’s nephew, Roy E. Disney. The collaboration between these two legendary artists will be available to own for the first time along with an all-new feature-length documentary that examines the surprising partnership between Dali and Disney."

http://www.ultimatedisney.com/platinume ... 91011.html

Clearly states when and how Destino will be released. This info has been available since August 29, 2008. Next time some of you might wanna look before posting.

[blackcauldron85]

Not much info, but a nice little read:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/prin ... n-DVD.html
(via LaughingPlace.com)

[jotaabs]

zonadvd.com says Destino will come with both Fantasia & Fantasia 2000 Platinum Edition and with a documentary along, yet it's not clear if it will come out alone or included in this Platinums.

in spanish: http://www.zonadvd.com/modules.php?name ... &sid=10764

[goofystitch]

I meant to post this a while ago, but I went on a Disney Cruise in January and the art auction on the ship had some artwork by Salvador Dali, as well as prints of scenes from the film. I attended the auction just to see some of the images and they actually played the short. I enjoyed it, but its not my favorite and I'm actually glad it wasn't in Fantasia 2000 because it would have felt very out of place.

It is pretty much guaranteed that the short and the documentary will both be bonus features, and I'm assuming they will be on Fantasia 2000 because that is the film it was finally competed for and it wasn't meant to be in the original Fantasia, but was going to replace a piece in a subsequent release.

[blackcauldron85]

Actually, Destino wasn't finished until 2003, so it would've been included in Fantasia 2006.

[blackcauldron85]

Here's an article that I read in the Boston Globe Magazine when I was a teenager- it was how I first became interested in Destino. I have always found it interesting, so I figured that I'd post it here. I'm also going to post an article from 2004 that I just discovered that is very interesting. I know that by now, we know the backstory on Destino, but if anyone is as interested as I am, you might be interested in the articles.

The Boston Globe
Boston Globe


January 30, 2000
WHEN DISNEY MET DALI THE ANIMATION KING AND THE SURREALIST ARTIST PLANNED AN EXPERIMENTAL FILM, BUT IT WAS NEVER MADE- AND FEW TRACES OF IT REMAIN.

Author: Christopher Jones
Edition: THIRD
Section: Magazine
Page: 12

Index Terms:
NAME-DISNEY NAME-DALI MOVIE ART MAJOR STORYMAG
Estimated printed pages: 9
Article Text:
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 mounted upon the backs of tortoises. As they converge, the space between them takes on the shape of a bell, which turns into a ballerina. In the last moment, her head abruptly becomes a baseball and disappears into a 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 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 he 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's 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 f! ilms, including Fantasia and Dumbo. For Destino, he was assigned to c oach 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 weird est partnerships ever produced by Hollywood's gold en 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 a! n 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 foraircraft. 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 stud! io. "Box office will follow quality," Disney was often quoted as sayin g 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 wit! h 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 sp! ecial effects in a larger Fantasia-like film. Disney originally inten ded 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 mi! xture 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 f! ashioned an entirely new method that nobody had really ever thought ab out. 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 ac! hieve 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 prog ress, 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 paranoidcritique 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.

Caption:
1. IN 1957,10 YEARS AFTER SHELVING DESTINO,WALT DISNEY (RIGHT) TRAVELED TO SPAIN TO DISCUSS OTHER PROJECTS WITH SALVADOR DALI.THEY, TOO, NEVER HAPPENED.
2. Destino dancers in Salvador Dali's "labyrinth of time."
3. A Dali head and tortoise from the 15-second "pencil test," or rough draft, of Destino.PHOTO
Memo:
Christopher Jones, a freelance writer based near Figueras, Spain, is a product of the Walt Disney Studios:
His mother was an animator there, and his father was a publicist.
Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company
Record Number: 0001200283

***************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Finishing this animated short was Destino: this 57-year-old collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney has found new life.(Back in the Day).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Post 19.4 (April 2004): p38(2). (939 words)

Author(s): Christine Bunish.
Document Type: Magazine/Journal

Full Text :COPYRIGHT 2004 Advanstar Communications, Inc.
BURBANK -- It's rare that an unfinished work of art gets a second chance at completion. But that's exactly what happened with Walt Disney Pictures' animated short Destino, which began 57 years ago as a collaboration between legendary surrealist Salvador Dali and Walt Disney. After post-war economics sidelined the project, its storyboards and paintings lay dormant until 2001 when a new generation of filmmakers took up the charge to complete Dali's vision.

Guided by executive producer Roy E. Disney and producer Baker Bloodworth, Paris-based director Dominique Monfery and a team of French artists and animators finished the six-and-a-half-minute film, a Dali-esque love story replete with the artist's signature melting clocks and barren landscapes, plus tuxedo-clad eyeballs, ants that turn into bicyclists, two giant heads carried on the backs of turtles representing the Fates, and the Tower of Babel. The animated short received a 2003 Academy Award nomination.

At first glance, the pairing of Dali and Walt Disney seems surreal in itself. But there were a surprising number of links between the two men. When Dali visited California for the first time in 1937 he wrote to Andre Breton, the founder of the surrealist movement in Paris, that he was "in contact with the three great American surrealists--the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille and Walt Disney." Dali had an early interest in filmmaking having teamed with Luis Bunuel in 1929 to make Un Chien Andolou. In 1945 Dali was back in Hollywood, creating the dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, when he and Disney decided to collaborate on a film.

Disney himself had been a magnet for artists of all kinds: Stokowski, Balanchine, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aldous Huxley all came to visit the Studio. Celebrated animation historian and author John Canemaker points to surrealist influences in Disney's films such as the Pink Elephants On Parade sequence in Dumbo and the title song in The Three Caballeros.

The concept for Destino grew out of a Mexican ballad by Armando Dominguez that Disney had conceived as a vehicle for South American singer and dancer Dora Luz who had appeared onscreen in The Three Caballeros. The theme of destiny appealed to Dali who began crafting imagery exploring the destiny of love. Disney envisioned the animated short as part of a future compilation feature.

After Dali spent eight months working on Destino the project was halted due to financial difficulties at the Studio. An :18 test, uncovered in the negative film library in 1970, was all that existed on film before Destino's revival. That test appeared in The Disney That Never Was segment of Fantasia 2000 and prompted Roy Disney to complete the project. "He said, 'We've got to make this; we've got the road map," Bloodworth recalls.


Disney not only had the road map, it had a key player who was present at the creation. Ninety-five-year-old John Hench had been assigned by Walt Disney to assist Dali and still had vivid recollections of the experience. Hench, who died earlier this year, had put the original film test together from two painted cels in a last-ditch effort to convince Disney that the project was worth continued financing.

Although Hench's effort failed, the film test "was an important element for us to have." Bloodworth says. "We scanned the negative and kept the segment in the film almost intact." Fifteen conceptual paintings and development pieces and 135 storyboard sketches were also available to the animators.

The producers had assembled the unnumbered story sketches in what they assumed to be the correct order of play. There had never been a screenplay for the film; the song's lyrics inspired the imagery. "Some sketches were so loosely drawn we couldn't figure out what was next," says Bloodworth. "John Hench told us we had assembled them in the wrong order."

Disney's Paris-based animation studio, under director Dominique Monfery, was selected to complete the production. "But Dominique turned us down when we first asked him to direct," Bloodworth recounts. "Then I sent him a batch of art and said, 'Just look at it.' He loved it." A veteran of Disney's Paris studio, Monfery's previous credits include supervising the character of Sabor the leopard in Tarzan.

Over a two-year period, a team of 25 artists, including three lead animators, worked to bring Dali's vision to the screen. "About 20 percent of the film has CG elements," Bloodworth points out. "We thought we should be beholden to and respectful of the period but not confined by it. From what I've heard Roy say, Walt would have used any tool at his disposal to push the medium."

The film test and four big oil-on-panel paintings by Dali established the look which animators executed in an array of media: oil-on-panel, wash, watercolor, pen and ink, and collage. To be more true to the spirit of the paint, it was decided there would be no separation lines. Classic 1940's animation techniques, such as cross dissolves, were also employed. Alias Maya was used to build the Tower of Babel, and CG lent a sense of perspective and camera movement to certain sequences.

Working from the original music and vocal tracks, a team of Disney sound technicians, headed by Academy Award-winner Terry Porter, improved and enhanced the sound quality while maintaining its period charm. Destino begins with a hissing needle drop.

When Bloodworth screened the completed film for John Hench and members of Spain's Dali Foundation, Hench said, "It's as I remember it," and the Foundation called it "a perfect blend of Disney and Dali."

"That was a great moment for us," Bloodworth says. "For a six-and-a-half-minute piece, it's been the most amazing journey."

Source Citation:Bunish, Christine. "Finishing this animated short was Destino: this 57-year-old collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney has found new life." Post 19.4 (April 2004): 38(2). General OneFile. Gale. Orange County Library System (FL). 30 Aug. 2009
<http://0-find.galegroup.com.iii.ocls.in ... rodId=ITOF>.


Gale Document Number:A116342254

[Jules]

A small note. I always knew Destino was made by WDFA, but I never was aware that the Paris studio of Disney Feature Animation made it! That's very interesting. Do we know if any of the established Disney animators in the US (Andreas Deja, etc.) got to work on Destino, or was it a French, and strictly French, production?

When I think of WDAS today I can't help subdividing it in three studios: Burbank, Florida and Paris. Of course, the last two no longer exist, but I think we all agree they did some very fine work, and it's a shame the Paris studio never got to do a feature (it'd be really cool to have some French-made animated films in the Walt Disney Animation Studios film line-up ).

[blackcauldron85]

John Hench helped out, but as far as animation goes, from what I know, I think it was a strictly French production.

[disneyboy20022]

This isn't news that it's coming to Blu ray or anything. However I found it on Youtube just now.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO8ffgDbM80[/youtube]

[FigmentJedi]

It's been on Blu-Ray for a while as part of Fantasia 2000's Blu Ray release

[disneyboy20022]

It's been on Blu-Ray for a while as part of Fantasia 2000's Blu Ray release

Let me re word what I meant.


This isn't news that it's coming to a new Blu ray anytime soon. or anything. However I found it on Youtube just now. Here's hope it will come to Blu Ray outside of Fantasia Blu Ray