Bridging 2 worlds: Dalí and Disney
In 1929, he helped Luis Buñuel make “Un Chien Andalou” — famous for the image of a razor blade slicing an eye — and he believed there were three great Surrealists in Hollywood: master of the spectacle Cecil B. DeMille, comedians the Marx Brothers and animator Walt Disney.
Architects of the Imagination, a new exhibition co-produced by San Francisco’s Walt Disney Family Museum and the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Nicolaou, who comes to the project after directing the feature-length documentary “Dalí & Disney: A Date With Destino,” says the contrasts between the two men are what strike first.
“Disney is Middle America and the embodiment of the American entrepreneurial spirit,” Nicolaou says.
While Dalí is meeting Freud and studying dream symbolism, Disney, because he is dealing with fairy tales and fantasies, is also dealing in dream imagery.
“Dalí loved machines and lenses and optical devices,” Nicolaou says.
[...] they both had work in a show at the Museum of Modern art in 1936 called ‘Fantastic Art:
Disney was the first to reach out after he saw one of his animators, Marc Davis, reading Dalí’s autobiography “The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí,” which he had checked out of the studio library.
In early 1945, the two finally met at a Hollywood party in the home of studio mogul Jack Warner.
In early 1946, with the end of World War II, the Disney-Dalí collaboration began in earnest, with Dalí coming to the studio to work on “Destino,” an attempt at surrealist animation inspired by an Armando Dominguez/Ray Gilbert song.
The idea was that Dalí’s trademark images — melting watches, floating eyeballs and otherworldly sights — would somehow meld with Disney storytelling.
A seven-minute version of “Destino” was eventually completed and released in 2003 and later included as a special feature on the Blu-ray special edition of “Fantasia” and “Fantasia 2000.”
The exhibition documenting the unlikely alliance of Dalí and Disney is a multimedia experience that combines paintings, sketches, photographs, film and music (and an audio tour is narrated by Sigourney Weaver).