Destino: When Salvador Dalí Met Walt Disney and the World Got Weird (Eventually)

Two grayscale men in suits on a surreal desert backdrop with a cracked pyramid. Text reads "Destino." Dreamlike mood.

It sounds like the setup for a surrealist joke: Salvador Dalí walks into a party and meets Walt Disney. But what happened next wasn’t a punchline – it was Destino, a short animated film that would take nearly six decades to reach the screen. Originally conceived in 1946 but not completed until 2003, Destino is one of the most unexpected creative mashups in animation history. A Spanish Surrealist and the King of American family entertainment? Somehow, it worked – but only just.

Dalí and Disney: An Unlikely Alliance

It’s difficult to imagine what common ground Salvador Dalí and Walt Disney could have possibly found. One made melting clocks; the other made talking mice. But if you look closer, Disney wasn’t entirely a stranger to the strange. His earlier films often flirted with the surreal, sometimes unintentionally. Think of Dumbo’s technicolour “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence (1941), where bulbous, wobbling elephants morph and dance to a cacophonous soundtrack. Or Snow White’s frantic flight through a dark forest in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), where trees claw at her like phantoms. And then there’s Fantasia (1940), a wordless fever dream of classical music, demons, and dancing hippos.

Three black-and-white photos show two men in suits walking, talking, and posing near a coastal landscape. One holds a book. The mood is friendly.

Meanwhile, Dalí was fascinated by animation. In 1937, he made his first trip to Hollywood, already convinced that animation was an ideal medium for the metaphysical. He even wrote to André Breton, founder of Surrealism, declaring that animated cartoons had become “so influenced by Surrealism that their creators proudly call themselves Surrealists.”

Dalí, in his usual performative style, said he had come to Hollywood to meet the three great American Surrealists: “the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille, and Walt Disney.”

The Fateful Meeting

In 1945, Dalí finally met Disney at a Warner Brothers party, while working in Hollywood on the dream sequence for Hitchcock’s Spellbound. The two men hit it off, each intrigued by the other’s eccentric flair. According to Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney, they were “fairly close” – perhaps bonded by their shared sense of showmanship and self-promotion.

By January 1946, Dalí had officially signed on to work with Disney. The idea was to create a short film to be used in one of Disney’s “package features” – post-war anthology films like Make Mine Music. The project was dubbed Destino, a surreal love story involving a woman and Chronos, the personification of time. Dalí described it as “a magical exposition of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time.” Disney, in his more down-to-earth style, explained it simply as “a girl in search of her real love.”

A woman in a flowing dress dances beside a large green figure covered in dandelions. The background is abstract, with earthy tones.

Making Destino – and Then Losing It

Dalí threw himself into the project. For eight months, he worked typical office hours – an uncharacteristically regimented schedule for the moustachioed iconoclast. Alongside Disney artist John Hench, Dalí produced 135 storyboards and 22 oil paintings. The desertscapes, melting architecture, and symbolic figures were pure Dalí, while the narrative (as much as there was one) still had a Disney core.

But by late 1946, the project was in trouble. Disney’s studio was financially overextended, with $4.3 million already owed to the Bank of America. The era of short films and anthology features was ending, and internal shifts in studio priorities made Destino a casualty. And, if the accounts of animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston are to be believed, the collaboration itself may have hit a creative impasse: “The picture was not becoming quite what either of them hoped when they started.”

Despite rumours of discord, Disney later wrote to a biographer that he considered Dalí “a very swell guy… It was certainly no fault of Dalí’s that the project… was not completed.”

And so Destino vanished into the vaults – a tantalising “what if” in the annals of animation history.

A Resurrection, 58 Years Later

The story might have ended there, had it not been for Roy E. Disney’s rediscovery of the original materials during the 1999-2000 Fantasia re-release project. Entranced by the dormant project, Roy quietly revived it. He assembled a French animation team, including director Dominique Monféry, to finish what Dalí and Disney had started. Working from Dalí’s storyboards and Hench’s notes, the animators stitched together a coherent (if elusive) six-minute film.

On a budget of $1.5 million – a mere fraction of typical animation costs – the project came together. A few minutes were trimmed from Dalí’s original vision, but the essence remained intact. The completed Destino debuted in 2003, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film.

Surreal scene with abstract figures and a pyramid in a desert. A figure reaches skyward. Mountains in the background under a blue sky.

A Dream Realised (Almost)

The finished film is a hypnotic blend of melting clocks, faceless statues, morphing deserts, and a spectral female figure navigating love and fate. There’s no spoken dialogue, just music by Mexican composer Armando Domínguez and visuals that border on the hallucinogenic. It’s unmistakably Dalí, but with a polished animation style that’s unmistakably Disney.

And yet, Destino is more than just a surreal artefact – it’s a symbol of what happens when two wildly different artistic minds collide. It didn’t come together easily, and it didn’t happen in their lifetimes. But when it finally emerged from the vaults, Destino offered a fleeting glimpse into a parallel world – one where the boundaries between high art and mainstream media blur, if only for a moment.