Destino

Here's a curiosity. Many years ago Walt Disney and Salvador Dali collaborated to make a short film, but it was not completed in the end because it was too expensive. Then, years later, Roy E. Disney decides to pull out the storyboards and make the film, and it was completed in 2003. The results are... interesting.

Having trouble understanding it? Read on for my thoughts on interpretation.


Apparently Dali was trying to create a new kind of animation-art. The film is kind of hard to follow as a result, but still nice to watch.

As far as I can gather, the story starts with a young, mortal lady who sees a statue of chronos and falls in love with it. Then a dance sequence from her perspective commences that illustrates the difficulties of her love, or something. I don't know for sure. But then her eyes fall, as if her thought are comming back to the present, and she sees a shadow of a bell. When her shadow overlaps with the bell's it appears as though she's wearing a dress. She dives into the shadow.

At this point she appears to have managed to make the statue aware of her, because it comes to life. But it probably doesn't really come to life, we're just being shown the statue's perspective.

That's right. The statue has a perspective.

Anyway.

So the staue fell in love with her too, but a labrinth wall appears and seperates them. She sends a flock of birds and they guide him to the exit, to a vision of herself which melts away into... a baseball. Hmm. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that baseball is some kind of sexual metaphor, because I don't know what else to interpret it as. Anyway, baseball happens, and the batter hits the ball to the catcher, who is also the statue-man, and he holds her (she's made out of a sheet at the moment) and the man fades back into the statue in the desert.

As the camera comes toward the statue, there is a hole where the heart is, and when you peer through it you can see that bell that resembles the woman, and there are dandelion seeds blowing from the bell and into the statue's open heart.

And that's the end.

So. Time is a theme in this, since there a clocks all over and chronos and it's Salvador Dali. Then there is the stuff where the girl tries to kiss a man and his face melts away and she's left with a broken statue with one leg. And there are all the eyes pointing at her and her robe catches on them and she becomes naked. I think this part might be about a young woman falling in love with an old man and all the fears that come with that, like being judged and her lover dying before her. But she decides to dive in anyway.

I'm not as confident in what the man's perspective is supposed to be. Why are there barriers to him reaching her, I wonder? Unless it's literally supposed to be about a god and a woman... maybe she was more worried about herself dying, not him? Anyway, she is the source of him living at all, from his point of view. He comes to life because she sends seeds toward him, and then he's going from being a statue to playing baseball, which is a lot more lively.

Somehow it's a love story. But I can't explain the guys on bicycles with bread on their heads. I'll let someone else figure that one out.

Also, telephones.