Destino Salvador Dali and Walt Disney's Unfinished Animated Short

An Unlikely Collaboration

In 1945, two of the world's great creative geniuses, animator Walt Disney and Spanish surreal painter Salvador Dali, formed an unlikely collaboration on an animated short called "Destino" ("destiny" in Spanish). For eight months, they worked together with master Disney Studios storyboard artist John Hench. In 1946, production was shut down. While no one knows the exact reason, some say that postwar Disney Studios was in deep financial trouble; others say that the Disney Dali collaboration was too much a mix of oil and water.

Ten years after the collaboration, Disney said, "Ordinarily, good story ideas don't come easily and have to be fought for, but with Dali, it was exactly the opposite."

Disney first met Dali at a dinner party given by Jack Warner. At the time, Dali was working with director Alfred Hitchcock on the dream sequences in the feature film "Spellbound."

The original idea for "Destino" came from a Spanish ballad by Armando Dominguez. The short was originally intended to be a part of an animated feature that was to be a musical compilation like "Fantasia." Disney's original vision for the short was as a combination of live action and animation much like "Song of the South."

For fifty years, all that remained of "Destino" was John Hench's storyboards and an 18 minute animation test. (Dali's original portfolio for the film was stolen near the beginning of the project)

Walt Disney died in 1966. Dali died in 1989. And "Destino" became a strange footnote in the history of Walt Disney Studios.