The article was taken almost verbatim from my website (http://www.disneyshorts.org) at the paghe http://www.disneyshorts.org/miscellaneous/destino.htm. I have some of the inspirational artwork posted there if anyone is interested, although be aware that the site may not be up too much longer. I can’t afford to keep it going anymore and so far Geocities seems incognizant to the fact that I haven’t paid them in a few months.
Your article was very interesting, and the pictures on your site made me think that the Disney/Dali collaboration would have been wondrous.
I did spend some time at your website when you first announced it here. It’s great, and it has so much information that it would be a shame if it just went away.
Wow, Euty, that collaboration boggles my mind. Was the “17 second” clip all that was done to animate Dali? With modern animation, Dali could be done even to his own liking, with ticking clocks and melting bodies galore. But, I’m curious as to how it was done back on yond. ???
I’m afraid this has a bit of an “urban legend” ring to it, but I’ve spoken to someone who claims to have actually seen this thing. As far as I can remember, he described it as containing Porky Pig, beatnik anarchists dressed in black with berets, and endlessly telescoping doorways through outer space, and was just generally “trippy as hell”. He insisted that it was drawn or at least inspired by Dali.
In the context of all the other info, now I have my doubts, and wonder if this was some OTHER trippy, surreal Disney collaboration that got mixed up with the Dali thing. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
elelle To understand how the 17 second reel was created you need to understand a bit of how animation was done back then. It as all done by hand, but the main animators only did the more extreme animation steps, not every single frame. The inbetween steps were done by artists called, oddly enough, “in-betweeners.” In this case, though, Dali just did enough drawings to give Hench enough of an idea of what he was thinking with the actual animation done by Disney artists. In a sense the entire 17 seconds was done by Dali’s “inbetweeners.”
GalaciDaliciducleic Acid This is far from an urban legend. It is actual documented, recorded history. We have pictures of Dali working at the Disney studios, and the 17 second test reel has been shown on The Disney Channel as part of a short biography of John Hench. The short that your friend probably saw was called “Porky in Wackyland” which was done by Warner Brothers and does have quite a bit of Daliesque influence to it.
And so the mystery of “Porky in Wackyland” is revealed, and I may sleep again at night. Praise Eutychus. (I’m actually being only slightly ironic… this has bugged me!)
My “urban legend” comment didn’t refer to the actual Dali project, but the fact that someone had claimed to have seen the lengthy finished product (which seemed most unlikely given the preceding discussion).
(Also, animated character copyrights being perhaps less than a major obsession of mine, it slipped my mind that Porky Pig was a different studio’s stutterin’, amusingly anthropomorphic animal.)