What happens when you lock the world’s most famous animator and the king of "melting clocks" surrealism in a room together? You get a 58-year-old headache and a six-minute masterpiece that nearly never saw the light of day. Honestly, the friendship between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney sounds like the setup to a very specific, very weird joke. But it was real. It was expensive. And for a long time, it was a total failure.
Most people think of Walt Disney as the king of family-friendly mice and princesses. They see Salvador Dali as the guy who walked an anteater on a leash and painted subconscious nightmares. They seem like polar opposites. In reality, they were obsessed with each other.
The Night at Jack Warner’s House
It all started at a dinner party in August 1944. Jack Warner (yes, the Warner Bros. guy) was hosting. Dali was there because he was working on the dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound. Walt was there because, well, he was Walt Disney.
They hit it off immediately.
Dali didn't see Disney as a "cartoonist." He called him one of the "three great American Surrealists," right alongside the Marx Brothers and Cecil B. DeMille. Walt, on the other hand, was tired of being told his movies were just for kids. He wanted to be a "serious" artist. He had recently read Dali’s autobiography and was so hooked he sent the artist his own copy to get it autographed.
By 1945, they had a deal.
The project was called Destino. It was supposed to be a short segment in a "package film"—basically a movie made of several short stories, similar to Fantasia.
Why Destino Became a Ghost Project
They started working in late 1945. Walt paired Dali with John Hench, one of his most trusted and classically trained artists. For eight months, the two worked side-by-side. They produced over 135 storyboards, sketches, and 22 gorgeous oil paintings.
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But there was a problem. A big one.
Dali and Disney couldn't agree on what the movie was actually about.
- Dali’s Pitch: "A magical exposition of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time."
- Walt’s Pitch: "A simple love story—boy meets girl."
You can see the tension. Dali wanted to explore the metaphysical agony of Chronos (the god of time) falling for a mortal woman named Dahlia. Walt just wanted a relatable romance. When Dali started throwing in sketches of baseball players with their heads floating off, Walt started getting nervous.
Then, the money ran out.
World War II had been brutal on the studio's finances. Fantasia hadn't made the money Walt hoped it would. The studio was in "survival mode," and a bizarre, avant-garde short about a girl turning into a dandelion wasn't going to pay the bills. In 1946, Walt quietly pulled the plug.
The project was shelved. For decades, the only thing that existed was a 17-second animation test John Hench had cobbled together to try and convince Walt to keep going.
The 57-Year "Lunch Break"
Dali and Disney stayed friends. That’s the part people usually get wrong. They didn't have a falling out. They visited each other's homes. Dali even went to California to ride Walt’s miniature backyard train, the Lilly Belle. In 1957, Walt and his wife Lillian visited Dali and his wife Gala at their home in Port Lligat, Spain. They even talked about doing a Don Quixote movie together. It never happened.
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Walt died in 1966. Dali died in 1989. For a long time, Destino was just a legend in the Disney archives.
It wasn't until 1999 that Roy E. Disney (Walt’s nephew) stumbled across the project while working on Fantasia 2000. He decided it was time to finish it.
How You Actually Finish a Dali Painting
Finishing Destino was a nightmare for the animators. Imagine trying to finish a crossword puzzle where the clues are written in a language that doesn't exist anymore.
A team of about 25 animators at Disney’s Paris studio had to decipher Dali’s cryptic storyboards. They used the journals of Dali’s wife, Gala, and the first-hand memories of an aging John Hench (who was in his 90s by then) to figure out the flow.
They used a mix of traditional hand-drawn animation and modern CGI to make the paintings "move" in a way that felt authentic. The music was another hurdle. They found the original 1940s recording of the song "Destino" by Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez. It was scratchy and full of "pops" and "hisses," but digital tech allowed them to clean it up and use it as the backbone of the film.
The final product was released in 2003. It was 58 years late.
What the Film Actually Looks Like
If you watch Destino today (it’s on Disney+), it’s a trip.
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You see a woman dancing through a desert that looks like a classic Dali landscape. She interacts with a giant stone head that turns into a shell. There are tortoises with human faces on their shells. There are baseball players who turn into beret-wearing men on bicycles.
It’s beautiful, haunting, and completely un-Disney.
It actually got nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 2004. It didn't win, but that didn't really matter. The "unlikely" partnership had finally been vindicated.
Real Insights for the Modern Creative
The saga of Salvador Dali and Walt Disney isn't just a cool bit of trivia. It tells us a lot about how art works.
- Creative friction isn't a failure. The fact that they disagreed on the "meaning" of the film is why the final product is so compelling. It has the structure of a Disney story but the soul of a surrealist painting.
- Great ideas don't have expiration dates. Just because a project gets "shelved" doesn't mean it's dead. Sometimes the technology or the culture just needs fifty years to catch up.
- Cross-industry collaboration is king. Disney was a tech innovator; Dali was a fine artist. Their "vibe" was different, but their obsession with "the impossible" was identical.
To really appreciate this, go watch the six-minute short first, then look for the documentary Dali & Disney: A Date with Destino. It shows the actual sketches compared to the final frames. Seeing Dali’s messy pencil lines turn into high-definition animation is the closest thing to time travel you’ll find in the art world.
The next step for any fan of this era is to look into the "Package Films" of the 1940s like Make Mine Music or Melody Time. They show a side of Disney that was much more experimental and willing to fail than the corporate giant we know today.