Cinema Suicide

I don’t like Disney animations. I haven’t in some time. Back in the day, during the most vital part of the company’s history, there was a time when you could see that Walt Disney was all about pushing the boundaries of animation and approaching it as a source of entertainment while still treating it as art. Disney employed power house artists of the era to contribute to some of their most ambitious projects but even with names like Kay Nielson and Oskar Fischinger involved it still surprises the shit out of me that Salvador Dali and Walt Disney were tight.

Seems like several years ago that I first heard about Destino. Maybe I read unconfirmed folklore about it at Snopes but it was very much spoken of in the same way that people talk about Walt Disney’s cryogenically frozen corpse being contained under the Pirates of the Carribean ride at Disney World. It’s just another strange rumor. Turns out that the unfinished animation was found back in 2003 by Roy Disney and that on November 11, 2008, Disney plans to release the finished product on 2-disc DVD. Rounding out the package is a feautre-length documentary about the Destino project, another feature about unfinished Disney projects and then an exploration of the surprising line-up of personalities who were involved with Walt over the years.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t report to you on such matters, but this is Salvador Dali and his weird-ass psycho sexual art wrapped up with an organization best known for milking the pockets of parents everywhere. Destino serves as a reminder that Disney wasn’t always about scorched earth marketing tactics but at one time was a daring studio that would bet the farm just to see how far they could push the envelope.

Read more at DVD Active. Thanks to Twitch for the heads up.