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July 22, 2007
Dali + Disney = Destino
Perhaps this is old news, as I've seen of a few websites that Destino has been making the rounds at a few film festivals since 2003, but I'm so tickled I just have to blog. As I mentioned in my last post, I just got back from a whirlwind (read exhausting, but very fun) weekend bouncing around south east England, and in London. While in London I made a stop by the Tate Modern gallery, mainly in hopes of seeing Sam Taylor Wood's video installation piece Brontosaurus for the first time since 2000, when at a much tender-er age I thought I'd been scared for life when encountering the young man in the video's wildly swinging junk. Alas, it is no longer on display and is somewhere deep in the bowels of the Tate's archives, inaccessible to all but the curators. There was, however, a great Dali Exhibit. I've appreciated Dali's work on a purely aesthetic level for years, who can resist images like those in One Second Before Awakening From a Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate?". However I know next to nothing about surrealism and was delighted to find out that it is linked to some of my favorite things, like Freud's ideas about sex and death, and that Dali was especially fascinated with early cinema. The usual famous paintings (and many many more ones I'd never seen before) were there, your melting watches and the above one with the tigers. But what was the most fascinating were the rooms showing the films Dali collaborated with other filmakers on, including the infamous Un Chien Andalou. What really wowed me, and what all this wind up is for, was Dali's collaboration with Walt Disney on Destino, which was sadly abandoned for various reasons, but finished in the past few years.
I would describe myself as an amateur fan of animation. I'm no great student of it, and I'd never have the patience to be an animator, but I really appreciate some of the finer things done with the medium. I really enjoy Don Bluth's stuff, as an edgier, more adventerous take on what Disney started (indeed Bluth did work at Disney for a while) and I was really into anime as a teenager (and there are still a number of shows and movies I adore and return to). So when I saw Destino it was like all of my favorite things in animation colliding-- the more adult, cinematic use of the medium as seen in 1988's Akira, with that unique Disney conception of character design and movement, as well as a Western perspective, referencing the kind of Classical art, mythology, and storytelling that is familiar to us. Perhaps this is why Destino felt so fresh to me, so intriguing. It made me wonder where American/Western animation could have gone if there had been any kind of market for animation as adult, intellectual cinema/art at the time, or even today. While Japan's animation industry is hardley serious all the time, it has put out far more animation that is decidedly grown up than the West (granted, Japan has put out far more animation of any sort than the US...). With several of the anime shows I've remained fond of referencing Western philosophy and style (think Revolutionary Girl Utena or Neon Genesis Evangelion), I do wonder how a broader Western animation industry would compare in its own approach of similar artistic and literary themes, or how we would approach the art and literary histories of say, the East. Destino is a very alluring glimpse into what could have been, and it gives me hope that Disney as it is today even bothered finishing it and showing it off at film festivals.
Phew, a little seven minute film sure did provide a lot of food for thought.
Oh, and a castle.
Dover Castle, to be exact.
| By Spike | 12:07 PM
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