Here is a short animation film, a product of an odd collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney in 1945… The film was not finished until 2003, and contains a mix of traditional animation and computer animation.
While I mostly like it, I must say I have an uneasy feeling about this film. First of all, painting as a medium has a point of being static so that movement, tension and resolution are all suggested within the seemingly unmoving pictorial space. And this is what creates the uncanny feeling, what produces the viewer’s response and an aesthetic effect. So for me more is lost than gained by animating Dali’s paintings. Secondly, I don’t think that a typically Disney-like face of the female character and classic Disney-style movement and dance animation work well with Dali’s aesthetics… It makes you wonder whether the end result was even close to what was originally intended by Dali and Disney. To me it looked more like looking at Dali’s paintings through the Disney-saturated goggles, rather than an actual collaboration. That said, still, I found it impossible to take my eyes off the screen for the whole duration of the short, and there were some very dreamlike moments, viscerally echoing the subjective experience of both dreaming and perceiving Dali’s paintings.
Still, I find that Dali’s experiments with the moving pictures media, such as in the collaboration with Luis Bunuel – Un chien andalou – are much truer to the surrealist project of free-associating, unearthing the unconscious imagery as well as taking the manifest content of dreaming as a primary source of inspiration. In this film the medium is, in my opinion, used more sensibly, utilizing its full potential, and, importantly, with a great deal of humor, which is largely absent in the Disney collaboration.
Here’s Un chien andalou
Part1
Part2
