Dali and Disney collaborate in Destino
Destino is the most psychedelically substantial six and a half minutes you’ll spend on online-video-watching today. A collaboration between two twentieth-century artists of the heaviest weight–Disney and Dali–Destino enthralls and enlightens.
Sometimes bits of art are lost, stored away somewhere forgettable, lost to poor filing and never seen again. Destino is not lost art. But it came close. Destino was cryogenically frozen in the Disney vaults for half-a-century before being brought back to life by Disney nephew Roy, and revitalized by French animator Dominique Monfréy. The results are magnificent.
The resurrected film–created from storyboards and scraps of animation left by Dali/Disney–brilliantly combines the aesthetics of the Daliverse and the Disneyverse into a metaphysical love story. There are elements you remember from childhood cartoons, nothing specific, just a general feeling of shared characteristic nostalgia, mixed together with the surreal perfection of Dali. The result is awesomely eerie and affecting.
The identity of the male character is as philosophically fascinating as the dance of the female character is aesthetically fascinating.
When you add a great soundtrack by Armando Dominguez, you are left with pure animated glory.
The desert setting, the themes, and the types of shots used really reminded me of Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert, which is definitely a good thing. I wonder if Dali’s paintings influenced Buñuel’s cinematography.
Watch Destino and be taken away to a world where your childhood entertainment is mixed with adult musings on reality.
