Surreal Australia Win for Dali, Disney Film
Mon Aug 11, 7:23 AM ET
SYDNEY (Reuters) - A long-lost seven-minute animation by surrealist Spanish artist Salvador Dali and entertainment titan Walt Disney, which took 57 years to complete, has taken the top prize at an Australian film festival.
Fragments of the unfinished film "Destino" along with story boards, sketches and an original score were painstakingly put together by a team assembled by Disney's nephew Roy Disney after they were discovered in the studio's vaults.
Disney now hopes that "Destino," which fended off almost 90 entries to take the Melbourne International Film Festival's Grand Prix for Best Short Film late on Friday, will be considered for an Academy Award nomination, and it is looking at ways of releasing the animation commercially.
"If you saw it, you'd say this is what I'd imagine Dali paintings to look like if they came to life," said David Stainton, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.
"The woman in the story morphs into a ballerina, her head morphs into a baseball, you know, crazy stuff. It's a light story with an undercurrent of melancholy as it's a story of unrequited love," Stainton said in a telephone interview.
At a dinner party in California, Dali and Disney hatched the plan to collaborate on the film, which was begun in 1946 but shelved shortly after as the Disney studio ran into post-war financial problems.
"I think one of the things which attracted these two men together was their shared sense of humor. Dali really had a very upbeat, but very strong sense of humor, and a lot of what you see in Destino is a reflection of that," said Stainton.
The two men remained friends for the rest of their lives, but never had the chance to work together again.
One of Spain's greatest 20th century painters, Dali was known for his showmanship and handlebar mustache.
He died in 1989 at age 84.
Reuters/VNU
Destino!
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