Disney Completes Dali Animation

jbottero writes "Wired News has an interesting piece on a Salvador Dali animation coming out of Disney Studios. It seems that in 1946, Walt Disney and Dali teamed up on a short film called Destino. The film was shelved for money reason, and now, 57 years later, Disney animators has finished what Dali started. The six minute film will be shown in theaters next year before a Disney feature film. The remnants of the aborted film include 150 storyboards, drawings and paintings, which have sat for the last half-century in the Disney vaults. Notably, some of the project was modeled on the animation program Maya. An interesting quote from the article, Dali describes Walt Disney as one of America's greatest surrealists."

Comments

Notable ?

[Animaether]

Notably, some of the project was modeled on the animation program Maya

And this is notable, why ?
Maya has been a mainstay for movie production involving 3D elements for a long time now. Or is this supposed to conjure images of Maya-on-Linux and thus make it relevant to Slashdot somehow ?

This isn't any more notable than a CGI team doing shots for CSI using Bipeds from Character Studio ( 3ds max plugin ) for one of those tacky sticks-in-bullets-holes-tell-us-where-the-bullets- went animations.

Effects houses will use the software that gets the job done, and hardly ever is the choice "notable".

Just my 2cts on -that- topic.

Disney completing a shelved project like this, for a 6-minute short, on the other hand, is more interesting.

Re:Notable ?

[shadowcabbit]

It's notable because now thousands of geeks are going to flock to the theater to see whether or not they can tell which bits were done in 1946 and which were done on Maya in 2003.

Seriously, though, the fact that an unfinished project using 20th century technology was completed almost 60 years later using 21st century technology, and supposedly it's going to look completely seamless-- I'd call that remarkable.

(On a related note, is it just me, or does the phrase "20th century technology" still not evoke the feeling of "whoa, that's old" as it should?)

Re:Notable ?

[mskfisher]

It's notable because they took the original ideas from the 1940s and were able to render them much more easily with the tools we have available today.

If the film had been completed in the 1940s or '50s, it would've been more difficult (or at least time-consuming) to get the perspectives correct. As the article says:

"It makes perfect sense that Disney used computer technology to do the 360-degree turns and to make some of the images seem more dimensional than they might in a 2-D cartoon," said [Leonard] Maltin, whose books include Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. "Dali's work was always very dimensional, and he was keenly interested in playing with perspective."

Sounds Like They Did It Right

[the darn]

I always cringe when Disney takes one of their early artistic works (back when it at least seemed like someone cared what made it to the screen)and trots it out all "modernized" or worse, sequelized. In this instance, at least from what I can gather, they've produced something with artistic merit. I saw sketches and such of this project on the Fantasia Legacy DVD, and immediately was impressed by the bizarre vision it presented. Noone today would consider Disney avant garde...but it (well, more like HE) really was back in the day. I'm glad to see this innovative idea finally come to fruition. One can only hope that it might serve as a wake-up call as to the potential of animation as art, instead of just babysitting-fodder.

Re:Salvador Dali's Dream of Venus

[Shorty Lugnuts]

When this DVD does finally arrive, I hope it includes the original 15 seconds of this test reel they have. It would be nice to see the original work before any CG enhancement.

Re:Who?

[SanLouBlues]

Well, I am a Dali superfan and I can say that he was without a doubt one of the best painters of all time. Only Escher's optical illusions are comprable to Dali's, but Escher did mostly works based on geometry, while Dali worked more with raw creativity. Every one of his paintings has a double image, and in several there are multiple ways to percieve what you're seeing. Not to mention the paintings are on par with classical masters such as Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, and Van Eyk, which no other painter has achieved in modern times. He is sort of similar to Kandinsky, both wanted to show what was inside of minds, but partially thanks to the drugs and the boundless talent, Dali's haullicinations stayed away from complete abstractionism.

I've also heard that he made a bunch of live action movies too, but I've never seen any.

Re:Disney Does Dali

[ahoehn]

Actually: I was at Dali Universe in London last weekend, and realized how much of Dali's work contains adult themes; and by adult themes I don't mean balancing checkbooks. I would say that a good third of the works I saw at the exhibition had overt sexual themes. I'll be interested to see what Dali without the sex looks like in a Disney cartoon.
Of course this goes well with Disney's tradition of subtley showing phalluses to children.