Destino

Today is the birthday of Salvador Dalí, one of the most famous artists to have ever lived.  It has been argued that this fame has as more to do with Dalí's self-aggrandizement than it does with his actual art, and it can't be denied that he was one of the most narcissistic people ever to have lived (case in point: the object in the right foreground of The Persistence of Memory is, in fact, a sideways profile of the artist).  There are plenty of other reasons to dislike Dalí, chief among them his tacit support of the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.  All that aside, though, it also can't be denied that he had considerable talent and that more people are drawn to his paintings than to those of any other surrealist.  I include myself in this group; there's something about the empty landscapes, nightmarish figures, and optical illusions of Dali's paintings that I find fascinating.  You can imagine, then, how excited I was when I learned that he had teamed up with Walt Disney in the '40s to make a short animated film entitled Destino.  It would seem that this pairing really was too good to be true, and for whatever reason the project never took off.  Destino was forgotten until very recently, when it was completed based on Dalí's original storyboard.  As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the great achievements in animation, right up there with The Rite of Spring in Fantasia.  I've attached a couple of clips below; if you like your cartoons creepy, then you'll absolutely love these.