Dalis and Disneys gather in Port Lligat in 1957.

“I have come to Hollywood and am in touch with the three great American surrealists — the Marx Brothers, Cecil B DeMille and Walt Disney,” Dali wrote to Andre Breton in Paris. Dali finally met the last of this triumvirate at a party in 1945 or ‘46 at the home of Warner Brothers studio chief Jack Warner, who had commissioned the artist to do his portrait and one of his wife.

There were several fascinating aspects to the Dali-Disney partnership, but its greatest fruit was “Destino”, the animated short film that took a long, long time to appear. In fact it almost never came to fruition at all, but by 2009 it was charming viewers in cinemas and at home in front of their computer screens, and in 2011 there was an elaborate screening at the Hollywood Bowl, with full orchestral accompaniment.

“Although Disney might be synonymous today with bland family-friendly entertainment, in the 1930s there was a widely shared enthusiasm for Walt Disney’s seeming desire to realise the full potential of graphic cinema,” Ian Christie wrote for London’s Tate museum during its 2008 exhibition about Dali and film. “After his exuberant ‘Silly Symphonies’ and first feature-length animation, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ (1937), Disney became a beacon for filmmakers and artists everywhere who despaired that cinema would ever be liberated from its slavish devotion to theatrical narratives.

“Sergei Eisenstein, the radical exponent of revolutionary spectacle and of ‘intellectual montage’, admired Disney to distraction, citing him as an influence on his own ‘Ivan the Terrible’. And the English convert to Surrealism, Paul Nash, regarded Disney as ‘one of the few geniuses of the cinema’, confessing in 1938 that ‘the mind totters at the very thought of the human machinery that builds up those delirious fantasies of Mickey Mouse’.”

However Christie, a scholar of film and media history’, acknowledged the shortcomings of the Dali-Disney collaboration.

“Fascinating though ‘Destino’ is as a realisation of the temporality that seems latent in many of Dali’s paintings of the mid-1930s — rather like the scheme to ‘animate’ famous paintings proposed in Nabokov’s novel ‘Laughter in the Dark’ — it also points to the limitations of an over-literal relationship between painting and film.”

Before we continue, though, more about the Jack Warner assignment that got things rolling.

He’d commissioned Dali to paint portraits of him and his wife, and Dali in turn pitched an idea to the movie mogul — a “documentary” about Dali’s book “50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship”.

The latter notion got nowhere — just like Dali’s proposal to Federico Fellini for a screen adaptation of his autobiography “The Secret Life” — but the Warners’ portraits turned out great.

Above “Portrait of Colonel Jack Warner”, and below, a detail from “Portrait of Mrs Jack Warner”.

In 2008 the study for the painting of Mrs Warner, seen below, came up for bids at Bonham’s in New York. It was on offer for between $40,000 and $60,000, but there were no takers — still a little pricey for a Dali sketch.

In her 1965 biography “The Case of Salvador Dali”, Fleur Cowles recounted Jack Warner’s tale of accepting the Dali treatment. When Salvador and Gala showed up at the Warners’ mansion to begin the portrait, Jack had assumed it would be a swift sitting.

“I was wrong, it took him five years! Of course he was not a house guest all that time. He would do several brilliant pen-and-ink sketches of my eyebrows, my mustache and my little finger, then off he would go to his beloved Spain. This went on for all those years.”

Whenever Warner asked for a progress report, Dali would only say that Dragon “looked fine”, referring to Warner’s co-subject in the portrait, his pet Schnauzer.

On seeing the finished picture, Warner suggested some minor alterations. Dali told him editing was only done in the movies, but made the changes anyway. Nevertheless, Warner hung the portrait in Dragon’s kennel.

“Of course,” Warner said, “I have a suspicion that he was more right than he realised. Dragon will certainly be immortal and I am by no means sure that I can expect to get top billing. In all fairness to Dali, I must say that only excellent comments have been made about this portrait. Many important exhibitions have requested permission to include it.”

In his 2007 memoir “Close Encounters of the Worst Kind” composer Phillip Lambro, a friend of Dali’s, said he’d heard from an art dealer in Beverly Hills that the Warners kept the portrait of Mrs Warner in a closet! Lambro was told that Jack gave Dali several photos of her to work from, and Dali came up with “really a beautiful portrait of his wife, but all around her head were secondary portraits of all of Mrs Warner’s ex-husbands”.

Fleur Cowles also recalled the time Dali played a trick on Warner during one of their after-dinner strolls in the garden, during which the film mogul enjoyed crushing any snails he saw. Finding the lawn teeming with more snails than usual, Dali goaded him into spearing and smashing them all one by one with his walking stick.

Dali was beside himself with laughter — he’d planted fake snails all over the garden.

“Destino” had its genesis when Dali approached Disney with the suggestion that Walt was the man who could make “the first motion picture of the Never Seen Before”, as he touted it in his Dali News. He wrote Disney that he felt they had a “common destiny” and that he spent the rest of the night after meeting him at Warner’s “almost entirely without sleep”. Dali’s painting of the head of Jupiter hung in Walt’s office until the day he died.

Dali gushed in a June 1946 letter to Disney about “the miracles of technical realisation which I know you are also as exigent and maniacal about as is Dali himself”.

Disney and his wife Lillian made plans to join the Dalis for some fishing, purportedly a mutual passion for Salvador and Walt, although I’ve never seen a photo of Dali with a rod or a net in his hands. Still, he promised Walt he would help him “catch those fabulous crawfish” in California’s Carmel River.

Brian Sibley, an authority on Disney and his work, was surprised at how close he and Dali appeared in their 1946 correspondence when it was made public in 2010, “But they were both showmen and I think they just found a common bond,” he told the Independent on Sunday. “They both had rather severe fathers and quite difficult childhoods. There were certain personal elements that would have given them a kind of kinship.”

Disney saw the possiblities in Dali’s art and thought they could work together. He assigned director John Hench to get him involved in animating a romantic Mexican ballad by Armando Dominquez called “Destino” that Disney had purchased with the intention of featuring singer-dancer Dora Luz of “The Three Caballeros” fame in a segment for one of his package films. Walt wanted Dali to do the backgrounds.

The studio hit a financial reef, however, and the film version of “Destino” was shelved indefinitely. At least financing was the official excuse. To this day some will argue that Disney feared the American middle-class would find Dali’s imagination too disturbing. “There was nothing ’safe’ about Dali’s ideas at all,” Brian Sibley pointed out, “and Disney seemed willing to embrace them — he knew that he wasn’t going to be doing a Mickey Mouse movie.”

It was not until 2002 that art directors at the Disney studio reconsidered and saw how modern computer-generated imagery could finally help resurrect it. It was completed the following year — six minutes of elegant motion with eyeballs wearing dinner jackets, a wall eroded by the sands of time and a ballerina’s head that turns into a baseball — and ultimately came out on DVD in 2010 with the revamped “Fantasia” feature. There are ants, crutches and melting watches. The heroine could be Alice (cousin Monserrat) with her skipping rope, seen in so many of Dali’s paintings.

When the Tate Modern in London held an exhibition on Dali and film in 2006 it published an interview with Roy Disney, Walt’s nephew and ultimately director emeritus of the Walt Disney Company, who recalled that his uncle had Hench share his classical-art background with Dali on the “Destino” project.

“Dali produced about 15 paintings and about 135 sketches. They worked closely together to the point where they couldn’t tell each other’s drawings apart … John was the only one in the world, until he died, who could sit down with us and say: ‘That’s mine, that’s his.’

“After eight months the project stopped because of money problems,” Roy Disney said, “but Hench took two painted cells of Dali’s work and simulated an animated movie on a camera stand.”

This was the 18-second clip rediscovered at the studio decades later, after actress Bette Midler made a casual reference to Dali while taping a promotional clip for “Fantasia 2000″. Roy Disney decided to add Dali’s work to the promotional campaign — only to discover that the studio was contractually forbidden from using it until the featurette was finished!

Roy figured they’d better finish it, and with input from Hench, director Dominique Monfery and producer Baker Bloodworth got busy with the CG. “Monfrey took the best of the drawings and then went back to the Dali works to find patterns,” Bloodworth said.”

“The modern techniques which we subsequently [added] — such as revolving cameras around objects — made sense, and are actually very Dali-esque in themselves,” Roy Disney said. “I know that he and Walt would have gone nuts to be able to do that kind of filming.”

In a 2010 article on the Disney fan site MousePlanet.com, original Mouse Club member Wade Sampson reported that Dali was given a room on the third floor of the studio’s animation building and everything was “top secret because they had not settled on exactly what that project would be”. He arrived for work first thing every morning, with Gala to inspire and interpret, and sometimes had lunch with Walt and Hench in the studio’s Coral Room restaurant.

“Disney legend Ward Kimball remembered that Gala would sometimes pin directions to Dali’s house on Salvador’s jacket if he came to studio by himself so if he got on a bus someone would be able to help him find his way home … For several months Dali worked out of his Monterrey, California, studio, near the old Del Monte Lodge Hotel, and Hench would commute there on weekends.”

Dali didn’t like the Mexican ballad he was working from, Sampson noted, but he “loved the word ‘destino’ and his imagination began to run wild as he created an entire elaborate scenario. Dali visualised two lovers in an ever-changing dreamlike landscape and the effect that time and other obstacles had on that relationship.”

The plan was for a six- to eight-minute segment, but Dali “continued to add new ideas and symbolism so that the story became ever-more complicated and unwieldy. Dali: “It is a magical exposition of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time!” Disney: “It’s just a simple story about a young girl in search of her real love.” Nevertheless Walt wanted to “keep breaking new trails” and knew that Dali “bubbles with new ideas”.

Hench and Bob Cormack made continuity sketches to help segue from one Dali image to another. “Walt came in and looked at the work from time to time,” Hench said. “He saw the storyboards in progress and decided to let Dali go ahead and see what would happen. Dali was given complete freedom.”

Disney did make his own contributions. Hench credited him for the sequence in which Jupiter is blocking the labyrinth and a hummingbird opens a passageway.

When it looked like the project might get scrapped, Hench put together a 15-second clip from the work in progress to bolster interest. Walt Disney was interested, and then Hench hired a small cinema in Monterrey for a private screening for Dali. “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.”

Ultimately Walt told Dali that “Destino” was dead because there was no longer a market for package films — although he was still releasing them two years later. “Walt abandoned ‘Destino’ very regretfully,” Hench said. “He hoped to pick it up later. He had gotten a great kick out of the project and besides admiring Dali’s talent, he liked him personally.”

Shown here is Uncle Walt’s own rendition of Sal.

Dali also held out hope that they could still produce art together, and during the 1950 the Disneys visited the Dalis in Port Lligat on at least two occasions and discussed other projects.

One involved an animated feature on Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, another on “Don Quixote”, and a third, says Sampson, on “El Cid”, for which “Dali supposedly developed a story concept that might have included a live-action Errol Flynn”.

British commentator Brian Sewell has claimed that Walt contacted Dali “as late as 1961″ (the Gala-Dali Foundation has said 1957) about the possibility of making these animations. Dali, some believe, did make the cels in 1962 and 1963.

Captain Peter Moore, Dali’s long-time secretary who died under a cloud of suspicion over alleged forgeries, included 101 “Divine Comedy” prints in an exhibition at his Figueres museum, the Perrot-Moore Art Centre, in 1998, but they were allegedly different from the original illustrations.

Speculation ensued that these prints were in fact animation cels that Moore had commissioned another artist to prepare for a proposed film version of “The Divine Comedy”. These works were among those seized by the police when Moore was soon after charged with manipulating Dali originals.

In 1958 Walt Disney put together an “Art of Animation” museum exhibit to tour the US, Europe and Japan ahead of the release of “Sleeping Beauty”. He wanted to include Dali’s art, which was housed in the studio’s animation “morgue”, but “was shocked to discover that practically all of the major Dali art had disappeared”, Sampson reported. “Walt never had the heart to tell Dali what had happened.”

What happened, just as had happened on Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” set, was that collectors absconded with much of Dali’s artwork for the cartoon, including storyboards. Pieces have occasionally shown up at auction.

In late 2001 Spain’s El Mundo reported that a Barcelona merchant had come forward with 11 of Dali’s preparatory drawings for “Destino”. Disney biographer Christopher Johns told the newspaper that determining whether such pieces were Dali’s or John Hench’s was as problematic as tracing their origin. Nevertheless, the director of Barcelona’s Chagall Gallery, where the 11 drawings were put on exhibit, swore they were genuine Dalis.

“At least one reliable source indicated that 55 sketches by Dali and 75 by Hench were preserved at the studio in the early 1990s,” Sampson wrote. “Supposedly, the original portfolio for the project had almost 375 sketches and 22 completed paintings.

“Robert Descharnes … has pointed out that some enterprising seller has faked Dali signatures on some of the unsigned ‘Destino’ originals and even painted some phony ‘Destino’ artwork that has been sold over the years.”

Sampson says an appeal for memorabilia was made to Disney employees when the Disney Archives were established in 1970. “Five Dali paintings mysteriously reappeared and they were cleaned and put safely away. Also in the 1970s, Albert Field, who was a New York-based appraiser, approached Dali and showed him some unsigned, newly discovered artwork from ‘Destino’. Dali couldn’t distinguish the drawings by Hench from his own work so he signed them all.”