Saturday, April 3, 2010

Surrealist Fantasia

Destino from only one on Vimeo.



In the long course of human history, many strange things have happened, among them an attempt by Salvador Dali and Walt Disney to collaborate on a short film. Dali, as much a showman as an artist, was of course a great admirer of Disney -- in 1937 to wrote to a friend, "I have come to Hollywood and am in touch with the three great American surrealists -- the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille and Walt Disney" -- and anybody who has seen the drunk sequence from Dumbo knows that Disney was a bit of a surrealist. So they hit it off easily. Disney had originally intended Fantasia (1940) to be the first of a regular series of collections featuring experimental animation, and it seems from what I can find that he intended for Dali's film to be part of that plan. For reasons nobody seems to know, Dali and Disney halted the project in 1947. The remains, including 150 storyboards and some very short film sequences, sat in the Disney vaults for 50 years. Then some Disney animators discovered them and used digital animation to turn Dali's drawings into this six minute film, released in 2003.

I think it's kind of cool. If you like Fantasia, check it out.

More information about this strange partnership here and here.

No comments: