A YouTube user calling himself BigDaddyAEL1964 saw the Dalí/Disney film Destino and what came to his mind was Time by Pink Floyd. It was a stroke of genius.
Salvador Dalí met Walt Disney in 1945 and both knew on instinct that they had to collaborate on a project.
That project was Destino, the story of a svelte butterfly like girl with sensual movements who catches the eye of Chronos, in Greek mythology the symbol of the eternal passage of time. Time – always running out – was a Dalí obsession that found form in his 1939 masterpiece the Persistence of Memory where time is seen melting like a camembert cheese.
Dalí created over nine months 80 pen-and-ink sketches, numerous storyboards, drawings and paintings. He had reached an advanced stage in the project’s development but time as well as money was running out. World War Two had just ended and the Disney Studio was low on cash.
The brief strip of film they had shot was stunning, whimsical, ahead of its time and was left in the can. It was forgotten for 58 years until Disney’s nephew Roy E. Disney in 1999 dug it out of the archives and dropped it on the desk of producer Baker Bloodworth. He brought in French animator Dominique Monféry as director and a team of more than twenty animators spent eight months finishing what Salvador Dalí had started.
Destino premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2003 and received an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Film.
Pink Floyd
The film is a tour de force, it draws you in and you look on in awe at Dali’s amazing artwork. But… There was a but. The project needed one more twist to turn perfection into magic.
Fifteen year later in 2018, BigDaddyAEL1964 moved the last piece in the three dimensional puzzle into place and put Dali, Disney, Destino and Pink Floyd together. He added Time from Dark Side of the Moon and turned the visual experience into opera.
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say
Like Dalí, Roger Waters reminds us in his lyrics that time is all we have. As we age and energy dulls, we will come to regret the time we fritter and waste today waiting for someone or something to show you the way. Of course Roger Waters, Dalí, Disney and Floyd never wasted a moment and their art will live on long into the future.
Illuminating! I’m not English (though I demonstrate a smattering of disability in my abuse of the language). Yet clearly, I must have a strong kinship as I, too, am ‘hanging on in quiet desperation.’