The phonograph needle ground into its stop groove. Armando Dominguez’s sweeping Mexican Ballad Destino finished establishing the mood. The walls of the room were a montage of pencil sketches and paintings. Salvador Dali paused as he completed narrating the visual sequences to this song, and told a journalist at the Disney Studio in 1946 that everything he ever painted will be in it, all his pictorial concepts -- the melancholy of space, dissolving images, hallucinations of man and landscape.
Just as with Bauhaus abstract painter and animator Oskar Fischinger who worked on Pinocchio and Fantasia, Walt Disney invited Salvador Dali to invigorate the artistic boundaries of his studio. The two met at a party that WB studio head Jack Warner gave around the time Dali was designing a sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Spellbound. Shortly thereafter, Dali started work on the Disney lot designing visuals for a short entitled Destino which was intended for inclusion in one of Disney’s anthology features, like Make Mine Music. Walt Disney stated in 1946: “Like the Night On Bald Mountain sequence Kay Nielson designed for Fantasia, I want to give more big artists such opportunities. We need them. We have to keep breaking new trails.”
Destino is a short animated cartoon released in 2003 by The Walt Disney Company. Destino is unique in that its production originally began in 1945, 58 years before its eventual completion. The project was a collaboration between American animator Walt Disney and Spanish painter Salvador Dalí, and features music written by Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez.
The funny thing is that the film hasn't been released in a DVD. A disc featuring Destino was slated to be released on November 11, 2008 but has been put back in the company's release schedule. It's not known at this time when the DVD will be released.
