Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 (Short Film Sunday: Destino)

If you go to any cinema related message board on the Internet, usually if Walt Disney Pictures is brought up, it is in very negative tone focusing on the company's law suits, urban legends, arrogance and a growing consensus of some of the films as being overrated. Hardly anywhere does normal bloggers give Walt Disney and all of the very talented animators that followed in his footsteps and company the credit they deserve, being a collective group of true visionaries in the animation medium. It is easy to look at the strides Disney has taken in recent years, just 2009 has already featured the Disney-Pixar instant classic Up, and will see the return of 2D animated princess stories with The Princess and the Frog, as well as Disney's distribution of Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki's latest Ponyo. Yet, if you look back to 1945, you can see just how influential of a filmmaker and artist that Disney himself, and his companions were. The very popular Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali came together for a collaboration with Disney, eventually writing a screenplay with Disney employee John Hench for a short film called Destino, until the financial troubles the company felt in a post-World War II world would eliminate the means to create the short. However, when gathering segments for Fantasia 2000, Walt's nephew Roy E. Disney would bring the project back to life, hiring director Dominique Monfery to use Dali and Hench's storyboards, Dali's wife, Gala Dali's, personal journals, as well as consulting with the then 92 year old Hench to create what the film would had originally looked like, and adding music from Mexican singer Armando Dominguez to fit in the music inspired art theme of the Fantasia sequel. Monfery would also use an eighteen second snippet from the test footage actually animated by Dali, just re-colored. It is the scene with the tortoises, around the 5:22 mark of the video.

The short, of course, wouldn't end up making the movie, but would be released theatrically alongside the comedy Calendar Girls in Britain and Sylvain Chomet's brilliant Italian animated feature The Triplets of Belleville everywhere else. It would also garner four critics awards and an Academy Award nomination for best Animated Short Film, losing out to the Australian Harvie Krumpet.

But before you get all bent out of shape due to an Oscar nomination, most of my favorite shorts doesn't get close to seeing the famous golden statuette, but what makes the film special is that two very different, yet very influential artists could come together and create such a beautiful film. If you're a fan of Dali's, you could watch some of these images unfold all day, one my favorite scenes being a throwback to the Dali-written, Luis Bunuel directed 1929 Un Chien Andalou (my favorite short film, which one day I will get around to posting on here), starting at about 4:02 minutes in. So, without further ado, 58 years in the making, a true, rare (this is more than likely pirated, so if YouTube deletes this soon, my apologies), classic, Destino.


P.S. I found the picture on a random wallpaper search on Google. Kind of a nice peice of fan art in itself.