...

Compelled to clear up the mystery, I started calling anyone who might have had any information. Steered toward former Disney employees and Dali acolytes - some now in their 90s - my research progressed slowly, until one day the phone rang. It was John Hench, calling from California. Now an elderly senior vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering, at the time of the Destino project he was a Disney artist who worked in high-level capacities on a number of films, including Fantasia and Dumbo. For Destino, he was assigned to coach Dali in Disney's animation technique. Dali at the time described Hench as the "spectral silhouette, who knows better than Dali or Disney the technical secrets of the film."

...

Almost 10 years after he stopped production of Destino, Disney was preparing for his renowned "Art of Animation" museum exhibition and casually dropped by the studio archives to check on the Dali background paintings and other Destino artwork. He thought the work done would add another dimension to the exhibit and silence forever his critics among the intellectual community.

My father had only just joined the studio publicity department and was there when Disney made a startling discovery: Virtually all of the major Dali art, including the portfolio of 375 drawings for the pencil test, had disappeared from the studio morgue. Despite urgent appeals to return the missing art, no questions asked, there was no response. Fifty years later, Kimball says Disney had been lackadaisical, "to say the least," to put the Dali art in an unprotected or unmonitored place. "Some of the artists were just waiting to get their hands on them."

...

Sometime after Disney's death, in December 1966, chief archivist Dave Smith appealed to all Disney employees to donate any Disneyana they had. As mysteriously as the five major Dali paintings had disappeared, they reappeared, but no place of honor was accorded them. The conservative post-Walt management had them cleaned and hung in the archives storeroom, far from public view. At about the same time, says Robert Descharnes, an avant-garde filmmaker and photographer who was Dali's right-hand man, a New York-based appraiser and archivist, Albert Field, approached Dali in the Old King Cole bar of the St. Regis, in New York, and showed him some unsigned, newly discovered artwork from Destino. But Dali couldn't distinguish the drawings by John Hench from his own work, so he signed them all.

Ever since then, authentic unsigned Destino drawings on Disney's special animation paper by Dali or Hench occasionally turn up on the art market. But according to Descharnes, the foremost authenticator of Dali art for the auction house Christie's, an enterprising and talented crook has faked Dali signatures on some of the unsigned originals, and the same individual has painted phony Destino artwork which is even for sale on the Internet.

Over many years, my father became fascinated by the story of the mysterious film project and began to interest me with it as well. Little by little, he managed to assemble the few available fragments of the Destino project into a file that one day he hoped could serve as the basis of a book celebrating the surrealist adventure of these two titans of 20th-century art and cinema. When I was growing up in Southern California, I, too, knew that "they" were there. Somewhere in the Walt Disney studio vaults is still a fortune in "unwanted" paintings by Salvador Dali. They have never been appraised and have certainly never been exhibited.

They are all that remain of Destino.

Park West Gallery is an agent for the artwork published by Collectors Editions from the Dali - Disney Destino project. We are very pleased with their professionalism and reputation and very much enjoy our mutual business relationship.

The Destino artworks published by Collectors Editions are of the highest quality graphic fine art works and have included various media: etchings, lithographs and serigraphs - all from Dali's originals. The works are subjected to the highest scrutiny of artistic quality and are created in strictly limited editions.

We have observed increasing demand for the works over time and consider them highly collectable examples of one of the 20th Century’s most interesting artistic collaborations.

These were all done posthumously in concert with the release of the Academy Award nominate Dali/Disney Destino short film in 2004. Thus, there is no Dali pencil signature; an embossed Dali/Destino stamp is on each piece. These are all recognized and approved by the Estate of Salvador Dali; and prints from this Destino series were included in a travelling Dali exhibition 2 years ago.

The prints are mostly serigraphs on paper, and there is one etching and one stone lithograph. There are some prints that we have that are also signed by Roy Disney.

Yes, the printing was created from the original storyboards painted/drawn by Salvador Dali.

The printing was executed by Eclipse Workshop and artwork represented/published by Collectors Editions. We are a licensee of Disney, and authorized to represent this portfolio of artwork.

Originally a profitable industrial technology, screen printing was eventually adopted by artists as an expressive and conveniently repeatable medium for duplication well before the 1900s. It is currently popular both in fine arts and in commercial printing, where it is commonly used to print images on T-shirts, hats, CDs, DVDs, ceramics, glass, polyethylene, polypropylene, paper, metals, and wood.

A group of artists who later formed the National Serigraphic Society coined the word Serigraphy in the 1930s to differentiate the artistic application of screen printing from the industrial use of the process. 'Serigraphy' is a combination word from the Latin word 'Seri' (silk) and the Greek word 'graphein' (to write or draw).

The Printer's National Environmental Assistance Center says 'Screenprinting is arguably the most versatile of all printing processes.' Since rudimentary screenprinting materials are so affordable and readily available, it has been used frequently in underground settings and subcultures, and the non-professional look of such DIY culture screenprints have become a significant cultural aesthetic seen on movie posters, record album covers, flyers, shirts, commercial fonts in advertising, in artwork and elsewhere.

Salvador Dali was a pioneer in the realm of printmaking in the twentieth century. All printing methods used by Collectors Editions in the publication of Destino artwork are the same ones used by Salvador Dali throughout his career, performed the same way, with Dali's artistic vision and sensibilities kept firmly in mind.

Serigraphy. By screens. Only two authentic Dalí prints are serigraphs.

The Destino prints are copies of scenes from the Disney short subject film. They were created long after Dali's death. Dali had NO involvement in them. Park West does not list them under Salvador Dali as the artist. They are listed under artist Destino. They have minimal value, maybe $200.00 each as a decoration.

Dali and Disney: The Art and Animation of Destino

DAYTON, OHIO -- Park West customers are sharing some surreal artwork with the Dayton Art Institute. To celebrate the museum's 90th anniversary, starting in October the DAI will show Dali and Disney: The Art and Animation of Destino. The Destino works are on loan to the DAI courtesy of Springboro couple, Dr. Lawrence and Holley Thompson, who purchased the pieces from Park West Gallery - the exclusive seller of Destino. Destino resulted from a unique collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney.

Subject: RE: Destino
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:35:21 -0500
From: jkamykowski@parkwestgallery.com
To: (customer)

Mr. (Customer)

I don't know if you while doing your research you reviewed our website, regarding the Dali/Destino set.

The Destino set with Michael Young is exclusive only to Park West

I'd like you to review our website and the website below for a history of the Destino/Park West relationship.

http://www.collectorseditions.com/disney/vitae.php?aID=520Destino

Kind Regards

Justine Kamykowski
Appraisal Department
800-521-9654
option 2/Appraisal Department

Subject: RE: Destino
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:17:42 -0500
From: jkamykowski@parkwestgallery.com
To: (Customer)

I just left a message for you regarding your concerns.

The Destino Set is a limited edition of 475 numbered proofs, 275 international proofs, 50 artist's proofs, and 20 gallery proofs. A deluxe VIP edition of 195 signed by Roy Disney also exists.

Also, Michael Young holds the licensing agreement with Disney.

Kind Regards

Justine Kamykowski
Appraisal Department

Park West Gallery, Certificate of Authenticity - Click to view PDF

I don't remember much about the Destino prints to be honest. I hated them so didn't sell one! I didn't hate the prints, I hated the fact auctioneers were fooling the public into believing they are purchasing a rare, original Dali/Disney collaboration where in fact they are nothing more than mass produced posters! I know for fact that most auctioneers including a corporate trainer who often auctioneers at the VIP events sell them as original Dalís. They hold up a Divine Comedy print at $12,000 and say you can buy this one Dalí for $12,000 or ALL the Dali Destino's for $15,000 for example.

The original sketches at Disney Studios in Burbank, CA were not signed. The block signatures were added when they created the prints which again was many years after Dali died.

As far as we were aware the value in the print was it was Disney merchandise and limited edition. I'm sure some auctioneers probably sold it as a Dalí but they were simply limited edition posters. We were told to sell them on the basis we sell Dalí prints for 10-15k whereas you can have a set of 6 (later 7) for that price plus a copy of the DVD which we were told to say won't be released. I've since heard it is due out soon.

It's weird that when the Dalí and Film tour was at the Tate I went to check it out and didn't recognize any of the Destino works they had on display. I'm not sure if Park West or Disney chose which works to put into print.

We were publishing Destinos under agreement with Disney but used to print them not here but in Israel. Not sure what will happen now because Rami is shut down. I was so sure because I clearly remember seeing printing layout proofs for the first set in Albert's office.

One of the problems with these items, is that, as with other collectibles, they are for long term hold. There is no quick profit in this market. At the present, I can honestly say, that I do not believe that there is a secondary market for the Destino set, nor will there be for many years to come.

The fact that my own set is a 'VIP' set, signed and numbered by Roy Disney, theoretically should make my set worth about $32,890.00. However, with Park West offering discounts of up to 45% off of their normal "retail" prices, it makes my set worth only about $18,889.50 - slightly more than I paid for it - and have had no interest in the set whatsoever. Would I sell it to P.W. for what I paid for it? Of course - but they won't buy it. As a former sales manager I once worked with said to me, "This s#*!'s for selling, not for buying." In other words, Park West doesn't want the stuff. In all reality, what you and I currently own, is worth the paper, the ink and the labor, which went in to each print - about $700 each - and even that provided a handsome profit for the Publisher, Collector's Editions. As for the term, 'serigraph' - here is the description: Noun 1. serigraph - a print made using a stencil process in which an image or design is superimposed on a very fine mesh screen and printing ink is squeegeed onto the printing surface through the area of the screen that is not covered by the stencil

Basically, it is nothing more than a silk-screen process, done with a process similar to that of t-shirts.

It's a tough pill to swallow, but it is a reality.

I have recently in 07 spent $20,000 with Park West. We bought what was said to be Destino # (X) collection that was supposedly being unveiled for the first time. I was told they were lithos. But seems they are seriolithos.

...

I feel that I was lied to about the kind of paintings I was getting. And also their value. I have no problem with the expensive hammer price addition: they don't tell you about when they say framed, shipped and delivered to your door for $9,000 is actually $11,000 after all the add-ons.

They also showed us a DVD with Disney's nephew saying that Park West had exclusive right to the Destino collection. The DVD they sent me does not have him on it. They also claimed that these were pulled from the actual film Destino storyboards. After reviewing the DVD again I see that only one of my supposed lithos is in the actual piece.

And I knew something was wrong when I finished up my purchase and asked for a business card. Everyone got quiet. So I asked again - no answers from anyone. Finally one person said, "I will," but never gave it to me, just excuses. I took it as a shady situation: anyone doing fair business would not hide their phone numbers from you.

I was also told we were paying 40% under cost....

They also told me the movie DVD of it would never get released. Joke. Heard Disney is now putting it on his DVD collection for sale on Amazon.

I received a call from a Michael Young. Park West had him call me to verify the Destino collection. He also seemed like a fast talker and ran me in circles trying to explain that these are actually pressed from the plates of the Destino film.

But then told me that they hand select one of the signatures and place it on all of them to match. Sounds like some graphic work is being done.

During the week of 20-27 Jul 2008, I sailed roundtrip from Seattle to Alaska on the Holland America Line cruise ship Westerdam. On the night prior to the last full day of the voyage, a flyer was delivered to my stateroom with an invitation to "...a vintage Disney film that has been shrouded in secrecy for over 50 years". This presentation, by Julian (Iulian Spiridon), art director of PARK WEST, consisted of a seminar and an animated film entitled "Destino." The bulletin interested passengers further: "Unveiling Destino, a rare collection of masterpieces created through a unique collaboration of Walt Disney & Salvador Dali." Throughout the seminar, these artworks were continuously represented as good investments and would appreciate in value when Destino was released. I was quite intrigued and became interested in a couple of "lithographs." I was told by Julian they could only be purchased as a complete set. In the end, I bought seven artworks of Destino for over ten thousand dollars! I have not received them yet. However, I have received the certificates of authenticity and these state they are serigraphs (silkscreened like a tee shirt). I am upset and wish to cancel this sale and receive reimbursement. I think these artworks were misrepresented, fraudulent, and possibly Disney copyright infringements. Please advise as soon as possible. I appreciate any and all help.

Mr. Scaglione,

In October of 2006 while aboard the Seven Seas Mariner ship of the Regent Seven Seas Cruise Line, your representative, Mr. Elias Joseph, approached us with the information that a set of five numbered prints that Salvador Dali did as part of a cooperative Destino project with Walt Disney studios was luckily available for sale on the cruise. Elias Joseph stressed that these art works were a bargain. He said that he himself had earlier purchased the large head print (Destino # 74) for his collection. He stated that with only 300 prints made of each of the five subjects, very few of the art works are likely to be owned as a complete set of five. This "set scarcity" would inevitably lead to value appreciation in the future. Another factor in value appreciation of the art works would be the release of the Destino short movie by the Disney organization. When the movie is released to the public, it will spread the knowledge about the Destino project. This new widespread awareness would drive prices higher for the limited number of Dali/Destino prints. Elias Joseph gave a lecture one day on the topic of art work appreciation in value as an investment opportunity to diversify portfolios among a wider variety of classes of assets.

We purchased the set of five Dali-Disney limited edition numbered serigraphs as a direct result of the representations made by Elias Joseph of the Park West Gallery. As a bonus for this $16,146.11 sale an Anatole Krasnyansky print was framed and included in the art shipment to us.

...

We received appraisals from Park West for the six items totaling $ 24,650. We felt good that we had purchased art works appraised for $ 24,650 for only $ 16,146.11. You signed these six appraisal documents. Mr. Elias said we were eligible for a 13 month payment arrangement. We paid for this art by two checks dated 8/21/07 and 9/25/07. Copies of these checks are enclosed.

We happened to watch the Monday, February 11, 2008 "Inside Edition" TV program. We were shocked to learn of the widespread fraud perpetrated by Park West in sales of art works on cruise ships. ...Part of the path that led to this conclusion was that Salvador Dali had nothing to do with these works fraudulently alleged to be associated with him. They are not authentic as you stated in your signed certificates of authenticity.

In view of these facts we are demanding that you refund our entire purchase price.

....

On September 11th while aboard a Royal Caribbean Cruise (Rhapsody Of The Sea), I purchased Destino set #3 for $13,145. ...I did some follow-up research when I had the means to do so (not at sea), and after viewing the New York Times article and the Inside Edition and Orlando Local 6 programs, I have found out that the prints I bought are worth DRASTICALLY LESS than I was told by your auctioneer (Nicole Bentler).

...

I am now certain that I have been the victim of fraudulent misrepresentation and deceptive trade practices and I want an immediate refund.

....

Complaint Details: We are the subject of a cruise Ship Art Auction Scam. After much arbitration between not affording the art and making it accessible via credit card for lack of available immediate funds. We were highly influenced to purchase what we believe was an authentic reproduction of two great names DALI/DISNEY for a complete set of "DESTINO." We do not remember the auctioneer's name except to comment that this young man was the youngest we have come across in all our 15 years of cruising and purchasing fine art. We started our journey in finding out this information through trying to resell it back to PWG [Park West Gallery].

We had purchased from Princess cruises in the past and they always had a policy of buying back at the same price. We were told by PWG that they will not buy back. Through my googling I found Collectors Editions via e-mail and contacted Mr. Michael Young for the sale. He has not returned our call except to tell us to have PWG purchase it back. We would like to be included in this investigation for the sale of what we now believe was fraudulent salesmanship.

The Boston Globe
Boston Globe

January 30, 2000
WHEN DISNEY MET DALI THE ANIMATION KING AND THE SURREALIST ARTIST PLANNED AN EXPERIMENTAL FILM, BUT IT WAS NEVER MADE- AND FEW TRACES OF IT REMAIN.

Author: Christopher Jones
Edition: THIRD
Section: Magazine
Page: 12

Index Terms:
NAME-DISNEY NAME-DALI MOVIE ART MAJOR STORYMAG
Estimated printed pages: 9
Article Text:
Packed away in a storage box somewhere in Southern California is a tiny spool of color film, barely 15 seconds long, that is unique in the history of 20th-century art. It shows two bizarre figures, humanoid heads mounted upon the backs of tortoises. As they converge, the space between them takes on the shape of a bell, which turns into a ballerina. In the last moment, her head abruptly becomes a baseball and disappears into a bleak, mountainous Catalonian landscape. This 53-year-old snippet of nitrate film is all that remains from a forgotten animation project called Destino, a curious collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney that was never completed. The reasons Destino was never finished remained undiscovered for over five decades until sometime after the death of my father, Tom Jones, in 1992. In a gloomy attic in the Loire Valley, where he lived for five years, my brother and I discovered among his papers a collection of notes! , never-seen-before negatives and old photographs he had retrieved over many years as Disney's publicity agent. They triggered memories of my father talking about this project when I was growing up and of the evening he took me into Walt's Disney's office to see the portrait of Jupiter, a painting Dali did for Destino. I realized that the small trove we had found in France proved that a completed Destino would have been a sensation by any measure, a cinematic revolution using techniques way ahead of their time.

Compelled to clear up the mystery, I started calling anyone who might have had any information. Steered toward former Disney employees and Dali acolytes - some now in their 90s - my research progressed slowly, until one day the phone rang. It was John Hench, calling from California. Now an elderly senior vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering, at the time of the Destino project he was a Disney artist who worked in high-level capacities on a number of films, including Fantasia and Dumbo. For Destino, he was assigned to coach Dali in Disney's animation technique. Dali at the time described Hench as the "spectral silhouette, who knows better than Dali or Disney the technical secrets of the film.

Excited that someone was finally interested in Destino, Hench decided to reveal the film's mysteries and provided fascinating insight into one of the weirdest partnerships ever produced by Hollywood's golden age. Salvador Dali often said that his destiny was to "save painting from the nihilism of modern art." The man he chose in 1946 to help him bring his tortured surrealist visions to the wide screen was none other than the avuncular creator of Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney.

According to Hench, Disney's finances in 1946 were precarious. Ever since 1940, when the Bank of America shut down Disney's credit line after the animated concert feature Fantasia proved a box-office disaster, Disney struggled with an ever-mounting debt. To save his studio, in time he would be forced to accept an interest-free loan from billionaire Howard Hughes. Not even the success a year later of Dumbo, a brilliant 64-minute cartoon about a flying baby elephant, could make up for the loss of Disney's European markets when World War II started. The studio also suffered setbacks on the home front during the war years; it was practically taken over by the armed forces, churning out training films and designing comical insignia for aircraft. Many were services for which Disney was never paid and from which the studio was still recovering financially.

He decided that "omnibus" films - different short subjects packaged into feature-length films - seemed less of a gamble. Disney, always alert to opportunities, could always break the film up and release the sequences separately and recoup the investment, because shorts in those days preceded most films in theaters.

Eventually, perhaps out of desperation, Disney decided to draw big-name artists and authors to the studio. "Box office will follow quality," Disney was often quoted as saying to nervous money men. Or just maybe, a collaboration with a celebrated painter or author would placate the banks and his financial czar, elder brother Roy O. Disney. And he just might manage to keep his studio going.

Almost by chance, (Disney avoided Hollywood parties, preferring to don an engineer's cap and chug around his estate on a scale-model railroad) he was introduced to Salvador and Gala Dali by Jack Warner at the movie mogul's home one night in late 1945. The Dali's were staying with the Warner's while the surrealist superstar painted their portraits. Somehow, Walt Disney, who had founded an empire based on wholesome, Midwestern family values, and Salvador Dali, who once vowed to "spit on the portrait of my mother," hit it off, and a peculiar friendship of long standing was begun.

The match might not have been as odd as it at first seemed. For all his wholesomeness, Disney had been fascinated by avant-garde techniques and began experimenting with them in 1939. Critics praised Fantasia's toccata-and-fugue sequence as reminiscent of Kandinsky and Miro. Hench supervised this sequence using abstract images for the first time in a Disney film.

So a certain groundwork was already laid for the future partnership. Out of admiration for each other's accomplishments, they quickly struck a deal, with Dali agreeing to work on a project for Disney's studio. When the two met, Dali had just managed to complete his first Hollywood assignment, a dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, which producer David O. Selznick had summoned him to create. With greater respect for the film medium, Dali moved his easel to Disney's Burbank studios in 1946.

Since neither knew at the beginning what form their curious partnership would take, the project remained top secret for a while. That is, until Disney commissioned the Catalan painter to prepare a six-minute sequence combining animation with live dancers and special effects in a larger Fantasia-like film. Disney originally intended to use "Destino," a romantic ballad by Mexican composer Armando Dominguez, in a short musical number featuring South American singer and dancer Dora Luz. But the word destino sent Dali into raptures, and he began creating wild, imaginative pictures to illustrate his emotions.

As for the plot, it varied considerably, depending on which of the two men was doing the telling. "A magical exposition of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time," Dali expounded in his own publication, "Dali News." "Just a simple story about a young girl in search of true love," Disney modestly described it.

Dali quickly adapted to studio routine, parking his noted eccentric behavior outside. For over two months, he arrived punctually each day at 9:30 a.m. and worked diligently at his easel. Dali often lunched with Disney and Hench in the studio's Coral Room executive restaurant or visited with studio employees, chatting in his own language, an impenetrable mixture of French, Spanish, Catalan, and broken English. His wife and muse, Gala, frequently accompanied him to the studio to inspire, interpret, or just keep an eye on her husband. When she was there, he was even more productive, creating designs to fit the pre-recorded sound track.

Working out of a third-floor atelier in the old Animation Building at Disney Studios, Dali and Hench were indeed forging a completely new animation technique, the cinematic equivalent of Dali's "paranoid critique." This method, which has little connection with its title, is greatly inspired by Freud's work on the subconscious and seeks to insert hidden double images in the artwork. Dali would present an image that a viewer would recognize as one thing, and then slowly force the viewer to recognize alien shapes in the image, which would eventually reveal something else. "We all know that D. W. Griffith invented everything in motion pictures," reminisces John Hench. "But Dali fashioned an entirely new method that nobody had really ever thought about. Imagine a shot of two skiers in the snow. Nothing very startling about that. Just a pair of skiers. Then a panorama stops on a snowy hill. Nothing shows that the scene has changed, it's only that the skiers are out of the shot. Then the camera pulls back, and only now do we see the complete image. It's a nude, the naked hips of a woman! The substitution has been introduced very early in the sequence, but the eye continues to distinguish snow, maybe recognizing feminine forms, until finally it must admit that there is a woman and nothing else."

No one else had ever worked like that - combining surrealist art and animation. At the time, film as an art medium was not on the agenda. Most movies were simple cornball stories that in the best cases became classics, such as Casablanca, but many were unmemorable. Disney was trying to break out of the "kiddie" straitjacket and make "his" animation an art form. Of course, with Destino's shelving, his chance to achieve this recognition was gone forever. Destino would have broken the mold. Driving up to Dali's Monterey, California, studio, adjacent to the old Del Monte Lodge Hotel, one day in 1946, Hench found him dictating the script to Gala, who was handwriting the manuscript. Becoming more and more enthusiastic about this form of art-in-motion, Hench says Dali told him, "Animation enhances art; its possibilities are limitless."

As he plotted Destino in his free-form fashion to fit the Dominguez song, a cryptic scenario appeared, depicting Dali's ideas about love and what time does to it. The Gala-Salvador script describes how Destino lovers would be played by live ballet dancers flitting across Daliesque landscapes scattered with shattered statuary, telephones, seashells, and coins. They are struggling against time, in the form of a giant sundial that emerges from the great stone face of Jupiter, who determines the course of all human affairs.

Disney kept an eye on the work in progress, and, being an admirer of Dali's talent, was enthusiastic about the new look he was bringing to animation. So, once the storyboards were finished, Dali and Hench prepared the famous 15-second "pencil test," a kind of animated rough draft of the film.

"Salvador was back in Monterey, so once I finished filming the test, I drove up to show it to him," Hench remembers. "I tipped the manager of this little theater that was showing some B Western to show it after the film was over and the audience had left. The lights went out, and Salvador saw his artwork in full motion. He loved it. Just then the projectionist came out and practically roared, `What was that?' Dali and I looked at each other, and we both knew that it was a unique moment in art."

Disney decided to celebrate in his own way. One Sunday, he invited Dali and Hench to his Holmby Hills home above Brentwood, where the scale-model steam railroad called the Carolwood Pacific circled his estate. He never pretended to understand all of the artist's symbolism, for he realized that was part of Dali's mystique. However, he couldn't resist inviting top animator Ward Kimball, a pioneer of experimental forms of animation and creator of Jiminy Cricket, to pilot the creator of paranoid critique around the half-mile train line. "Along with the usual profusion of Daliana, Dali has conceived of using, for the first time, I believe, American baseball as a ballet form," Disney said that day.

It must have started sounding terribly way out for Walt's brother Roy O., whose business acumen never lost sight of the company's loyal but unsophisticated family audience. Would the Midwest public or the starchy theater owners really accept a Walt Disney cartoon of a woman with snails for feet and a toy car for a head? But perhaps this is only one of the reasons the project never reached the screen or the huge audience Dali envisioned. By late 1946, Disney called a halt to Destino, with regret, because his releasing agency felt the market for omnibus films was exhausted. Although Dali was disappointed, he was optimistic that in the future he and Disney could collaborate on something else or even revive Destino. Though this never came about, they did remain friends, and Disney visited Dali's home on Spain's Costa Brava after the artist returned there in 1949.

It seems Disney did hope to pick Destino up later on, and he was never one to give up easily. With his wife, Lillian, he visited Dali's villa off and on during the '50s to discuss an animated Inferno sequence after the Italian government had commissioned Dali to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy. Later, they discussed an animated Don Quixote, which Dali had recently illustrated, and even a live-action El Cid, which would star Errol Flynn.

Almost 10 years after he stopped production of Destino, Disney was preparing for his renowned "Art of Animation" museum exhibition and casually dropped by the studio archives to check on the Dali background paintings and other Destino artwork. He thought the work done would add another dimension to the exhibit and silence forever his critics among the intellectual community.

My father had only just joined the studio publicity department and was there when Disney made a startling discovery: Virtually all of the major Dali art, including the portfolio of 375 drawings for the pencil test, had disappeared from the studio morgue. Despite urgent appeals to return the missing art, no questions asked, there was no response. Fifty years later, Kimball says Disney had been lackadaisical, "to say the least," to put the Dali art in an unprotected or unmonitored place. "Some of the artists were just waiting to get their hands on them."

When Disney produced his animated version of Alice in Wonderland, now influenced by his association with Dali, he brightened the film with imaginative surrealist touches. When Dali phoned Disney from New York to congratulate him on his latest triumph and try to revive interest in Destino, Disney didn't have the heart to tell him that some of his artwork had been stolen, and he changed the subject.

Sometime after Disney's death, in December 1966, chief archivist Dave Smith appealed to all Disney employees to donate any Disneyana they had. As mysteriously as the five major Dali paintings had disappeared, they reappeared, but no place of honor was accorded them. The conservative post-Walt management had them cleaned and hung in the archives storeroom, far from public view. At about the same time, says Robert Descharnes, an avant-garde filmmaker and photographer who was Dali's right-hand man, a New York-based appraiser and archivist, Albert Field, approached Dali in the Old King Cole bar of the St. Regis, in New York, and showed him some unsigned, newly discovered artwork from Destino. But Dali couldn't distinguish the drawings by John Hench from his own work, so he signed them all.

Ever since then, authentic unsigned Destino drawings on Disney's special animation paper by Dali or Hench occasionally turn up on the art market. But according to Descharnes, the foremost authenticator of Dali art for the auction house Christie's, an enterprising and talented crook has faked Dali signatures on some of the unsigned originals, and the same individual has painted phony Destino artwork which is even for sale on the Internet.

Over many years, my father became fascinated by the story of the mysterious film project and began to interest me with it as well. Little by little, he managed to assemble the few available fragments of the Destino project into a file that one day he hoped could serve as the basis of a book celebrating the surrealist adventure of these two titans of 20th-century art and cinema. When I was growing up in Southern California, I, too, knew that "they" were there. Somewhere in the Walt Disney studio vaults is still a fortune in "unwanted" paintings by Salvador Dali. They have never been appraised and have certainly never been exhibited.

They are all that remain of Destino.

Caption:
1. IN 1957,10 YEARS AFTER SHELVING DESTINO,WALT DISNEY (RIGHT) TRAVELED TO SPAIN TO DISCUSS OTHER PROJECTS WITH SALVADOR DALI. THEY, TOO, NEVER HAPPENED.
2. Destino dancers in Salvador Dali's "labyrinth of time."
3. A Dali head and tortoise from the 15-second "pencil test," or rough draft, of Destino.PHOTO

Memo:
Christopher Jones, a freelance writer based near Figueras, Spain, is a product of the Walt Disney Studios:
His mother was an animator there, and his father was a publicist.
Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company
Record Number: 0001200283