It is not widely known that the Catalonian artist Salvador Dalí worked for eight months, between 1945 and 1946, with John Hench, a Disney Studios artist, on the production of “Destino,” an animated short film that tells the heartbreaking, failed love story of Cronus, the Greek god of time, and a mortal, Dahlia.
This film, though short, could only be completed years later, and was finally screened on June 2, 2003. During the years following the cessation of World War II, Disney Studios faced a severe economic crisis, and the project remained, abandoned, in a drawer. Until 1999.
While working on Fantasia 2000, the second part of the animated classic, Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew, decided to dust off the project, handing it to a relatively small Disney subsidiary company in France, under the tutelage of the director and animator Dominique Monféry. The results are almost seven awe-inspiring minutes of traditionally Disney-handmade animation (although some sequences were created on computers) on classic Dalí surreal scenarios.
And today we celebrate...