The artistic marriage of two cultural titans — Walt Disney and Salvador Dali — can be seen in Destino, a short film begun in the '40s and recently completed by the Paris Disney Studios. © Disney 2002.

At long last, Destino, the legendary unfinished animated collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali — two visionaries that struck up a friendship when the flamboyant Spanish painter worked in Hollywood in the '40s — has been completed and premiered June 2, 2003 at the opening of this year's Annecy International Animation Film Festival.

Most animation observers assumed Destino, mysteriously abandoned after eight months of storyboarding in 1946, was a lost cause. But the surrealist short, originally envisioned by Disney as a compilation film along the lines of The Three Caballeros, found new life when vice chairman Roy Disney initiated its completion last year, largely at Disney Studio France.

"It is a little different [project] for us," Disney says of Destino's cryptic artistic merits, which features such trademark Dali images as ravaging ants, eyeballs, melting clocks, the Venus sculpture coming to life as a beautiful woman and two gargoyle heads resembling the artist with turtles' bodies. "But I'm enormously proud that we've done this because it is about who we are as artists, how long our history is and how long we respect it."

Serge Bromberg, Annecy's artistic director, adds that the premiere is not only a great coup for the festival but a very fitting one. "It has been a great honor to premiere Destino in Annecy. As a historian of animation, the Destino project has always been the Loch Ness monster, the film of legend never to be seen… When Roy Disney [who was honored at Annecy in 2000] called me to say that the film was finished, I could not believe my ears. It was obvious right away that the only place to premiere the film was Annecy, not only because Annecy is the place for discovering new genres, new techniques and new ways of doing animation, and because France was the center of the world for Dali, but also because the new version was produced at the [Paris] studio and by a French director [Dominique Monfery]."

Disney, who served as exec producer, first hit on the idea of completing Destino after doing the Bette Midler interstitial for Fantasia 2000 that makes reference to the Dali work. "Out of using the material, I got into a conversation with attorneys about using Dali artwork to promote Fantasia 2000," Disney explains. "They told me that we possess it but don't own it." It turns out that the contract between Walt and Dali stipulated that the artwork doesn't become Disney property until after the movie is made. So there was a financial and historical impetus to this. Disney believes the project was abandoned because the compilation film was no longer commercially viable by the end of World War II."

Yet Destino is certainly profitable today, what with lithographs, books and inclusion on a future DVD with an accompanying documentary. Disney says the plan is to play other appropriate festivals after Annecy in the hope of garnering an Oscar nomination for best Animated Short subject.

Baker Bloodworth (Dinosaur), who returned to Disney after a brief sabbatical, served as producer. He says then animation president Tom Schumacher chose the French studio because of its unique sensitivity to the material and that Monfery (The Emperor's New Groove and Hercules) seemed the most appropriate animator to helm the five-minute short even though he had never directed before.