The Destino Animatic, and the Fate of Assembling Artistic Truths Into a Greater Whole
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Animation Studies The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory - ISSN 1930-1928 Ron Barbagallo - The Destino Animatic, and the Fate of Assembling Artistic Truths into a Greater Whole Date : 12-07-2019 The images described in this article of Dalí's animatics for Destino are available via Ron Barbagallo's Animation and Art Conservation, as part of his "Lost and Found Series." Figure 1: The theme of rejection and that of being cast aside till you figure it out is a theme that repeats throughout Salvador Dalí’s Destino. To illustrate the polarity of the different needs that separate men and women, Dalí drafts a literal barrier, and places them in front of doors, windows and stairs that could potentially allow each to move through these portals and pathways to the other side. (Image used with permission.) In the summer of 1946, Salvador Dalí sat in a chair staring at a single sheet of Disney animation paper. It was late in the morning and Dalí was sullen. Walt Disney asked him to cut his short down, saying it was visually complicated and ran long. But Dalí felt his narrative was lean. It was tightly conceived. Interwoven and fluid. It was a moving painting reminiscent of some of the longer musical sequences in Fantasia (1940). From where he sat staring down at his artist table, there was nothing to cut. Rejected, Dalí cast a hollow stare at the blank sheet of animation paper resting on his table. He held it up. He put it down, and held it up again. He looked out the window seeking escape. He wanted what Walt Disney promised him. What was contracted. He wanted to make the film he wanted to make. Then, abruptly, Salvador Dalí rose from his chair and held the sheet of animation paper up in one hand. With a good amount of theatricality and a dab of irony that bordered on the surreal, Dalí stood tall and announced to the room: “I can’t work on this. The paper is pre- designed.” Immediately after this pantomime, Dalí picked up the phone, called for a car and left the Walt Disney Studio, abandoning work on his Destino project in 1946. Animation Journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Animation Studies The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory - ISSN 1930-1928 This was not the first time creating art for Hollywood made Salvador Dalí’s head hurt. By 1945, Dalí’s struggle to find love from the Hollywood he adored and instead harvesting only rejection was nothing new. Nor was it something unique to the film he envisioned for Walt Disney. Any understanding of Dalí’s time at the Disney Studio must be counterbalanced by what was Dalí’s lifelong attraction to using film as a medium of artistic expression, and what pulled Salvador Dalí to Tinseltown in the first place — being asked by Alfred Hitchcock to create a cinematic dream sequence for the MGM film Spellbound. The story of Dalí coming to work for Disney is said to have started at a dinner party at Jack Warner’s house where Dalí was lured by a promise. Disney told Dalí that if he agreed to come to work at the Walt Disney Studio, Dalí could make the film he wanted to make. That sort of freedom coupled with the idea of being able to make a motion picture where the images you saw on the screen were hand-painted visuals that moved was particularly intriguing to Dalí. It meant Dalí could take the previously static ideas he had been working on and bring them life by way of making moving art with cross-dissolves, and setups where dreamlike imagery morphed from one image to another in an organic way. Dalí’s decision to accept Walt Disney’s offer was also enhanced by what was a failed amount of artistic control Dalí recently experienced while working with Hollywood giants David O. Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock on their film Spellbound (1945). A left brain/right brain work opportunity that was ripe for strife, Dalí was tasked by O. Selznick and Hitchcock to create a 4-minute dream sequence for their motion picture Spellbound, and instead Spain’s leading surrealist delivered a free-flowing amount of footage that reached 20 minutes in length; only two minutes of which was used in the final cut of Hitchcock’s film. Dalí’s discontent over the lack of respect for his artistic statement coupled with the horror that O. Selznick would take Dalí’s vision and cut it into disconnected fragments upset Dalí. This is why being offered an opportunity that gave him complete control was a real incentive. So Dalí doubled-down and accepted Walt Disney’s offer. The difference this time was — Dalí would get in writing that the film he was planning to make would be “completed as the artist had planned it” (quoted from an interview with Roy E. Disney done by David D’Arcy and published in The Art Newspaper). Even by taking this extra step, Salvador Dalí would come to learn that such is the bait and switch game of contracts entered into in Hollywood — a place where unhappy cinematic endings are often the result of promises made and when it suits someone, promises injudiciously broken. After contracts were signed, the news of the Disney-Dalí collaboration was made public in the November 1945 edition of the Dalí News. The announcement read: “Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí have reached a decision to produce in direct collaboration a new animated film in a new medium never yet tried. Nothing more can be said yet, but the American admirers of the melting watches can be reassured. These will appear in the film and, thanks to the virtuosity of Disney, for the first time, one will be able to see how they move. The melting watches in action” (November 1945 edition of the Dalí News). Salvador Dalí came to work at the Walt Disney Studio lot on January 14, 1946 and worked until April 1. This is what I will call the Winter story session. After the first of April, he took Animation Journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Animation Studies The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory - ISSN 1930-1928 some time off before returning to Disney to work on the Destino project on May 22, 1946. That work continued until July 31, 1946. This period concludes work on what I will refer to herein as the Summer story session. Dalí returned to do more work in August of 1946. His last documented visits to the studio range between April 1947 and the beginning of 1948, with no clear record of what was done during that time. In the decades that followed Dalí leaving the Disney Studio, the mythos surrounding the Destino project, (1946) became an oddity people talked about, like a question someone might throw at you while playing the Disney version of Trivial Pursuit. Journalists, in particular, filled the void of information about what happened in 1946 by publishing articles about how the Destino project (1946) was done for the sake of publicity. About financial hardships at the Studio at that time. They wrote about what opportunists Dalí and Disney were. How the two had enormous egos. My involvement in the story of Destino started in 1999 while I was interviewing former Disney employee Bill Melendez for an article for Collector’s Showcase. Toward the end of the interview, Melendez told me he was in the room the morning when Salvador Dalí walked off the Destino project in 1946 and he described to me the theatrical way Dalí left the studio. (Bill Melendez shared this story with Barbagallo toward the end of a phone interview Barbagallo recorded with the ex-Disney artist shortly before September 8th, 1999, the day Barbagallo used relevant portions of that Melendez interview to write the article for Collector’s Showcase.) I shelved that story in the back of my mind like so many other stories of Disney discontent told to me over the years during the course of my recording interviews with various artists and business people who worked with Disney. My involvement with Destino would surface again when Roy E. Disney asked me to attend an early screening of their 2003 Destino short on the Disney lot. Shortly thereafter, I published an article about the aesthetics around that film. After that article was published, I started to get an accelerating number of JPEGs from people claiming to have Dalí art from Destino (1946). Most of them did not until one day, someone did. That day was in the summer of 2014, when someone sent me high resolution digital files and asked for my review. That digital collection depicted images of what appeared to be 72 story sketches and 13 sheets of photographs of storyboards made by or under the supervision of Dalí for Destino. Eleven of the drawings in this digital collection are not present in the 13 sheets of photographs. Nor are they in the three additional sheets of photographs that would round out the full set of 16 photographs that make up the full record the Winter and Summer story sessions. When asked where the art came from, the story was a familiar one. A folder containing drawings and photographs were discovered after someone died when the deceased’s house was being cleaned out. The estate of the deceased reports that the artifacts were salvaged from the trash on the Disney lot.