'Destino': A Salvador Dalí and Walt Disney Collaboration Circa 1945

After last week's discovery of Salvador Dalí's little-known 1969 Alice in Wonderland illustrations, I followed the rabbit hole to another confluence of creative culture titans. In 1945, Dalí and Walt Disney embarked upon a formidable collaboration -- to create a six-minute sequence combining animation with live dancers, in the process inventing a new animation technique inspired by Freud's work on the unconscious mind and the hidden images with double meaning. The film, titled Destino, tells the tragic love story of Chronos, the personification of time, who falls in love with a mortal woman as the two float across the surrealist landscapes of Dalí's paintings. The poetic, wordless animation features a score by Mexican composer Armando Dominguez performed by Dora Luz.

As fascinating as the film itself is the juxtaposition of the two creative geniuses behind it, each bringing his own life-lens to the project -- Dalí described the film as "a magical display of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time" and Disney called it "a simple story about a young girl in search of true love."

The project remained a secret and didn't see light of day until a half-century later when, in 1999, Walt Disney's nephew Roy E. Disney accidentally stumbled upon it while working on Fantasia 2000, eventually resurrecting the dormant gem. In 2003, it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

(I can't help but wonder whether Destino inspired Ryan Woodward's stunning Thought of You.)

Destino can be found on the 2010 DVD Fantasia & Fantasia 2000 Special Edition.

Via io9.

This post also appears on Brain Pickings, an Atlantic partner site.