Dali’s sex symbol.

Interpreting Light and Shadow
Production designer Thierry Fournier confirmed that the lighting scheme was key in establishing both a surrealistic tone and in driving the narrative. “One of the hardest parts but also one of the most interesting is the scene where Dahlia, the female character, lays on the floor and is covered by the shadow of a bell and then it becomes a dress. So all the work when she stands between light and shadow was very hard to figure out. Because it’s all about shadow and light and at one point the shadow becomes a dress. It was not the technical part that was hard. What was hard was trying to tell this story with a visual logic. It was more about making sure your images make sense. Where do you put the light? Where do you put the shadow?

Fortunately, Monfrey and Fournier had experience with this as well as with creating characters without outlines in their animated experiments with UNICEF. “I think one of the reasons we were chosen for this was because of our experiments with light and color. We understood someone who has a really great sense of color, but who also understands how to put light on a character in a way that works easily.”

For the director, the biggest realization was that “Dali never drew a woman as a sex symbol. There was always something very sincere in the face that he painted or drew, so we tried to approach this more realistically, more true.”

Why Disney and Dali teamed up is still a mystery.

A Ballet of Video Conferencing and FedExing
Meanwhile, collaborating with the Burbank studio off and on for two years via video conference went pretty smoothly, according to associate producer David Bossert, who came up with the concept of the opening titles (also in keeping with Dali’s distinctively graphic style). “I think it was important to obviously bill Salvador Dali and Walt Disney as the two collaborators, and to make sure that we sort of set it up with a little paragraph at the beginning of the piece, because a lot of people outside of animation weren’t aware of or don’t know about the history of Dali,” Bossert said. “And certainly didn’t know why Dali and Disney hooked up. But also a lot of people didn’t realize that Dali had made Los Angeles his home for a number of years during the war. Because he fled Europe during World War II.”

Aside from that, Bossert added that the greatest challenge was not only making sure that all of the pieces came together properly but also maintaining Monfery’s vision in context with Dali’s. “It seemed almost easy. I mean, looking back on it just feels like it was just this interesting ballet of video conferencing and federal express packages just coming and going on a weekly basis, and it all just seemed to fall into place nicely.”

Bill Desowitz is the editor of VFXWorld.