When dali met Disney

Salvador Dali died in 1989, but the publicity-prone painter with the antennae-like mustache lives on in the collective unconscious as the personification of Surrealism and modern art. His precise trompe-l’oeil illusory landscapes and figures of fantasy, terror, and ecstasy are now Surrealist icons. He called them “hand-painted pho­tographs” of his dreams, the most famous being the “soft clocks” in the 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory.

In addition, Dali’s personal eccentricities—his egomania, mega­lomania, and pursuit of notoriety, such as smashing Bonwit Teller’s store windows and appearing in public in a deep-sea diving suit, among other delirious self-promotions—have congealed in the public’s mind an image of the modern artist as wild man.

The enduring fascination with Dali continues with a blockbuster Dali retrospective that ran from February 15 through May30 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Destino, an animated film begun in 1946 by Dali and Walt Disney that was finally completed in 2003. The long-delayed short won wide film-festival acclaim and received a 2003 Academy Award nomination; a DVD on its making is cur­rently in preparation.

To Dali and the Surrealists, film was a “perfect medium” to “ex­plore the realm of the subconscious,” wrote Julien Levy, an art cura­tor whose New York gallery became, in 1932, the first in America to sponsor a show on Surrealism. In that groundbreaking exhibit, The Persistence of Memory shared space with screenings of experimental films by Fernand Léger and Man Ray.

Four years later, after an exhibition of his paintings at the Mu­seum of Modern Art, Dali wrote to André Breton that Surrealism’s influence was so “enormous” that even “creators of animated car­toons are proud to call themselves Surrealists.” Dali’s disingenuous remark aside, animation has arguably always had a greater poten­tial than live-action to give form and movement to a metaphysical world, the realm of dreams, and the irrational.

Dali recognized (as did other Surrealists) that America’s animated cartoonists unwittingly applied Surrealist principles in the films they created. Spontaneous subconscious association and dream

 Left: Storyboard for the nightmarish

“Pink Elephants on Parade” musical

set-piece from Disney’s Dumbo (1941).

All Disney images ©Disney, all rights reserved.

Previous spread: Salvador Dali planted a baseball game in the middle of one surreal sequence in the Disney-pro­duced short Destino, which was begun in 1946 and completed in 2003. Previous page, below: Walt Disney (r.) visits Salvador Dali at the painter’s home in Spain in 1957.

 “CREATORS OF ANIMATED CARTOONS ARE PROUD TO BE CALLED

SURREALISTS,” SAID DALI.

 Logic abound in their work, including Walt Disney’s early Mickey Mouse and Silly Sym­phony shorts.

Even as Disney moved away in his films from nonlogical cause-and-effect, an essen­tial Surrealist anthropomorphism remains. In addition, Disney shorts and features often deal specifically with the dream state and the unconscious. There is Snow White’s terrifying escape through an anthropomor­phized forest and swamp in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and the grotesquely goofy “Pink Elephants on Parade” musical set-piece in Dumbo (1941), one of American Surrealism’s most sublime moments.

Traces of Surrealist iconography can also be seen in segments of Disney’s postwar omnibus features, Make Mine Music (1946) and Melody Time (1948). Destino, however, became the most overt, self-conscious at­tempt to capture Surrealist art in animation on the part of any Hollywood cartoon studio. During Dali’s first California visit in 1937, he wrote to Breton, “I have come to Holly­wood and am in contact with the three great American Surrealists—the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille, and Walt Disney.”

Something clicked when Dali met Disney at a studio party, and they promptly agreed to collaborate on making a short animated film. The odd couple had more in common than might be supposed at first glance. “Ap­parently, they were fairly close,” says Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew and the force behind the recent completion of Destino. “It always seemed to me they were both really relentless self-promoters and they must have seen that in one another.”

Publicity value in exploiting their collabo­ration was one component; but both men were also single-minded workaholics. Both admired precise, painterly craftsmanship and hard-edged photorealism mixed with romantic fantasy; each held a debt in their work to Victorian illustration.

Disney and Dali were also attracted to the total control and consistency that the medium of animation offers. It is an art form “free of all the accidental things that happen in live-action,” according to John Hench, Dali’s assistant on the film. The filmmaker is able to “make a statement pure, not full of ambiguities.”

Hench began his career at Disney in 1939 as a designer/storyman; later, he became a creative head of Walt Disney Imagineering, working there until his death last year at age 96. In 1994, Hench told me he enjoyed his stint with Dali, whom he found “genuine” and unpretentious. “His mind was going furiously. And he was so extraordinarily opti­mistic,” another trait Dali shared with Walt Disney. “Part of it was ego, but if something was happening to Dali, it had to be good because he was Salvador Dali!”

Dali signed a contract with Disney in Janu­ary 1946 for an undisclosed sum. “He was expensive,” Walt once admitted.

The artist arrived at the Burbank studio to begin work on February 7. The film’s vehicle was a bland Mexican ballad titled “Des­tino”—about a longing for lost love—origi­nally recorded (but rejected) for The Three Ca­balleros (1945). Disney chose the song because he already owned the rights and saw the film as “just a simple story of a girl in search of her real love.”

Dali saw much more. He went into parox­ysms ofjoy over the title’s open-ended possi­bilities, and determined the film would be “a magical exposition of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time.” The plan was to insert Destino into a future omnibus or “package” film, such as MakeMineMusic, which strung

Top row: Dancing fingers skip and slide on roller-coaster piano keys to Benny Goodman’s jazz in “After You’ve Gone” from Disney’s MakeMineMusic (1946). Middle and bottom rows: Im­ages from the same film, for the song “Without You,” offer moody landscapes inspired by Dali and Giorgio de Chirico.

In “Bumble Boogie,” from the 1948 Disney omnibus feature Melody Time, surreal butterfly eyes menace a hapless honeybee.

SURREALISTS AT THE MOVIES

Dali, along with other Surrealist artists, embraced and influenced cinema, live-action as well as animation. To the Surrealists, movies were of special interest because, as art curator Julien Levy noted, they allowed you to “discover and explore the more-real-than-real world behind the real.” Film plots per se didn’t matter as much as insinuations embedded in each action, which suggest a “story” beyond logic.

Some Surrealists went from movie theater to movie theater sampling a bit of each film and often leaving in the middle of a reel. (Some also enjoyed picnic lunches in the theater, to the an­noyance of regular patrons.)

André Breton, Surrealism’s founder and longtime leader, admired the unmotivated violence, multiple disguises, and illogical es­capes of Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas, the 1913—14 French silent black-and-white film serial; Antonin Artaud praised the “poetic quality” of the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crack­ers (1930); while Dali loved cheesy western serials.

“The more banal the picture, the more he loved it,” said John Hench, who worked with Dali on

the Disney Destino project. “It was more open somehow. Then he would explain to me what really took place, what the whole thing meant. . . . The stampede of the cattle is the man’s libido, and so forth.”

Luis Bufluel described the script for the film Un ChienAndalou (1929), which he cowrote with Dali, as “an encounter between my dreams and Dali’s” and the ex­traordinary result as “basically, a desperate, passionate call to murder.” Andalou is notorious for the still-shocking scene of a razor neatly slitting a woman’s eyeball (above).

But it was cutting of another sort—the editing of the film’s images according to dream (or nightmarish) nonrational logic—that brought Surrealist esthetic concerns to motion and vivid life. Traces of the Dali/Bufluel dream syntax influenced directors as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, David Lynch, and Mel Brooks.

A number of Surrealists made films—Bufluel, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Man Ray—but few became involved in as wide a variety of productions as Dali. His cinema associations ranged from avant-garde, independently made films, such as the Bufluel collaboration, to glossy Hollywood features, notably Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), which is famous for its Dali-designed dream se­quence (directly above), a veritable homage to Sigmund Freud. j. c.

Several shorts unrelated in subject matter into a feature-length format.

For about three months, Dali diligently worked 9 to 5 at the studio, turning out dozens of concept sketches and several oil canvases filled with his by-now signature im­agery: limp watches, shattered statuary, and grotesque figures on deserted landscapes. Hench tried to “keep the thing workable” by providing continuity for the free-form ideas Dali continuously and energetically sprout­ed. “He would outline the major points and the basic story,” Hench said, “but I would have to fill in the inbetweens [drawings] so that we could get from one place to another.”

Disney was enthusiastic at first. “We have to keep breaking trails,” he said. “Dali is com­municative. He bubbles with ideas.” But only a tantalizing is-second animation test—two grotesque heads atop tortoise shells con­verge to form a ballerina with a baseball head—made it onto film in 1946. That year, the project was shelved. “Walt decided the time for packaging [short films into feature length] was gone,” Hench explained.

Closer to the truth, perhaps, is the observa­tion of animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in their book Disney animation: The Illusion of life: “The picture was not becom­ing quite what either of them hoped when they started.” Another artist recalled that a baseball sequence, dropped by Dali into the romantic narrative in a true Surrealist spirit, literally threw Disney a curve.

But ego may also have played a part in the demise of Destino. Disney always maintained total control over his films, reshaping origi­nal material to his liking. As the elegant 2003 version of Destino shows, Dali’s vision could not be easily compromised.

Through the years, though, Dali and Dis­ney remained friends and discussed collabo­rating on other projects, such as an animated Don Quixote. A studio wag suggested they had gotten along well “because they couldn’t understand each other.”

Nearly 6o years later, the reconstruction of Destino came about when Roy E. Disney salvaged the brief animation test (heads atop tortoise shells) for a brief appearance in Fantasia/woo. In discussing the abandoned project with the company’s lawyers, Dis­ney, who sought to honor the history of the studio that his uncle Walt and father Roy 0. built—”Our roots are in art,” he said—made an interesting discovery.

Dali’s contract stipulated that his original artwork for Destino would not become Disney property until after the movie was made. “They told me that we possess it, but don’t own it,” Roy E. Disney said. Since vintage Dali art is potentially worth millions, this fact—in addition to Roy Disney’s wish to pay respect to his uncle’s visionary daring— provided sufficient reason to green-light the stalled production.

However, the production was kept “under the radar,” Disney told the Los Angeles Times. “It was one of those projects best done quietly, without any help. “Destino became “a spare-time project” made in Disney’s Paris studio (since closed), directed by a young French animator/director named Dominique Monfery under the supervision of producer Baker Bloodworth.

The original story sketches, concept art, and data were exhumed from the Walt Disney Animation Research Library and the Walt Disney Archives. Bloodworth brought in John Hench nearly a dozen times for advice regarding the continuity of what Roy Disney described as “a big jigsaw puzzle.”

“When we started the project,” he told

*  - Dali at the Disney studio in 1946 painting conceptual art for Destino. Left: Photos courtesy Photofest.

 DISNEY SHORTS AND FEATURES OFTEN DEALT SPECIFICALLY WITH THE DREAM STATE.

*  - Above, left: When tortoises collide in Destino, a ballerina is born. Above, right: An original Dali ink concept drawing for the baseball sequence in Destino.

WALT AT FIRST WAS ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT DESTINO. BUT THEN HE SHELVED IT.

*  - Above: A background from the film Destino (left) based on Dali’s conceptual watercolor of the same scene (right). Right: A young woman, searching for true love, contemplates a statue sym­bolizing the passing of time and the seasons. Facing page, below: One of the dozens of pencil sketches Dali made over three months for scenes in Destino.

the LosAngeles Times, “six or seven of us looked over all the surviving material, including photostats of the storyboards, but they weren’t numbered. There was a fairly clear beginning and a relatively clear ending, but what happened in between didn’t make sense. One thing didn’t lead to another, because we were reading the rows of drawings on the individual boards as you normally would, left to right, then down.” At one point, a story supervisor said, “If you read them all the way across, then go back to the second row, it makes sense.” “That was our eureka moment,” Disney said. “A bunch of guys who didn’t have a clue found their way in.” The crew found more clues from a journal kept by Dali’s wife, Gala.

“The piece was originally eight minutes,” producer Bloodworth said. “We edited one and a half minutes out.”

The reconstructed Destino is a graceful, symbolic exploration of emotions—the joy and pain of an adult amorous relationship as told through constantly metamorphosing imagery embodying the elusive and sensual quality of a dream. Though the erotic excesses of Dali the self-styled “Great Masturbator” are nowhere to be seen, this seamless fusion of traditional hand-drawn artistry with 3-D computer graphics is the least Disney-esque film in the studio’s canon. A long way from Snow White, it looks like an experimental film with big-studio production values. (Roy Disney said the budget for the reconstituted short was $1.s million.)

To express the agony and ecstasy in pursu­ing romantic love and desire, Dali threw into Destino many of his most familiar Surrealist images: Melting clocks, cracked statuary, vast barren landscapes, elongated shadows, among others, all make an appearance. He must have delighted in the possibilities animation offers for metamorphosis and “double images.” In one scene, ants emerge from a hand to immediately form a bevy of bicyclists carrying stones on their heads.

The making of Destino is a reminder of how daring Walt Disney was in initiating and exploring this film, which isso unlike any he ever produced. It also underlines how comparatively timid today’s mainstream ani­mation producers are, and how animation’s unlimited potential for expression remains restricted to children’s fare.

At the least, Destino illuminates a statement Dali once made to John Hench: “Animation enhances art; its possibilities are limitless.”

*  - Special thanks to HowardE. Green, vice president, Disney Studio Communications, and to Jerry Beck of Cartoon Brew.com for their help in preparing this article.

SURREALISM IN ANIMATION

Film historian William Moritz once noted the Surrealism that exists in the very earliest animated films— “the ‘magic’ objects ofSegundo de Chomon’s Electric Hotel(19o5) andJames Stuart Blackton’s HauntedHotel(19o7) and the metamor­phosis ofsize, shape, and function in Emile Cohi’s Fantasmagorie (1907).”

Winsor McCay’s pioneering animated films, made between 1911 and 1921, “con-trol mood to create a sensation akin to dreaming in the viewer,” observed Moritz. Little Nemo (1911), McCay’s first short, featured characters from the cartoonist’s

elaborately-drawn comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” a grand, epic dream quest begun in 1905 in the New York Herald. In the film version, Nemo and his pals first appear in sliced-up sections that fall together to form a whole person, while Nemo himself morphs from disparate lines attracted as ifto an invisible magnet.

Three ofMcCay’s films—ThePet, Bug Vaudeville, TheFlyingHouse (all 1921)—are based on his nightmarish comic strip, “Dreams ofthe Rarebit Fiend.” His precise, realistic drafts-manship and smooth animation add enormous verisimilitude to the films’

dreamlike state, presaging the Dali/Disney collaboration. Surrealism inundates Max and Dave Fleischer’s cartoons with their unconnect­ed gags, always surprising anti-logical morphing imagery, weird distortions, and overall pervasive menace and sexuality. Snow White (1934), a short released three years before Disney’s feature, stars Betty Boop in an unstable, nonlogical world where the face ofajealous, angry witch morphs into a pan complete with two eggs frying; in another scene, a ghost sings with Cab Calloway’s voice while performing his hi-dc-ho dance moves.

Irrational imagery, refashioning of reason, malleable timing, and deconstruc­tion of the narrative thread thrive in Tex Avery’s animated films, which were em­braced by many Surrealists. In Avery’s Bad Luck Blackie (1949), the sky rains upon a hapless bulldog with relentless

regularity such objects as a steamroll­er, a bus, a battleship, and an airplane. In KingSize Canary (1947), characters grow within seconds into humongous critters dwarfing the earth they stand on. “From the dust under foot to the clouds in the sky,” wrote film histo­rian Robert Benayoun, “Tex Avery scoffs at all notions of landmarks, metric systems, and scales of compari­son.”

*  - Betty Boop and friends in Max and

Dave Fleischer’s scary Snow White (1934)

encounter a witch-turned-dragon. © King

Features/Fleischer Studios.

*  - Tex Avery’s wolf in Red Hot Riding Hood (1943) has over-the-top big eyes for the off-screen Ms. Hood. © Turner Entertainment.

John Canemaker