How many drawings of male ejaculation did Salvador Dalí create for his film Destino? In this peer reviewed essay, Barbagallo says — No less than FOUR.
Ron Barbagallo
Director of The Research Library at Animation Art Conservation, Conservator, Writer, Curator, and Fine Art Photographer - Open to Work / Collaboration. IF YOU LINK-to-SOLICIT US, YOU WILL BE BLOCKED.
BURBANK, California — from Ron Barbagallo, the director of The Research Library at Animation Art Conservation
In the early 2000s, deficits from a series of expensive 2-D pieces of feature animation created a rift among the power players who controlled the Walt Disney company and its brand. The most tested player at this time was Roy E. Disney, the very person who was responsible for assembling the team that allowed a decade or more of Walt Disney Feature Animation to flourish. Roy saw 2-D animation as the foundation of the studio he loved. The studio that bore his name. And the studio that bore the last names of his uncle Walt and his father. But the executives Roy Disney put in charge became his rivals. Rivals he could not control, and rivals who, after Fantasia 2000 proved to be a critical and box office failure, fought with Disney about the future of the company’s brand.
Politics and shortsightedness in Hollywood are nothing new. In too many ways, those qualities are all Hollywood is. Also around this time, the Disney company was pressed by a court order to finish an old abandoned project from the 1940s: Salvador Dalí’s Destino. A project that was left in limbo ironically by similar circumstances: the studio’s shortsightedness and an unwillingness to invest more money in what seemed to be a failed direction.
What to do? Loose the assets in response to a court order? Or finish the short?
To protect the company’s position, Roy E. Disney had his executive producer assemble studio artists who were for various reasons were readily available and in 2003 they completed a version that co-opted some of the imagery Salvador Dalí made for his Disney film Destino. Like with Fantasia 2000, this version of Destino was met with mixed results.
Hollywood is a funny place. On its surface it offers a pretty product but under that polished veneer there is a money machine which is hinged on carefully worded press releases and official books that are designed to glaze over any truths that don’t further the brand. There are also cases where there are mistakes owed to the Peter Principle. And in some, if not too many cases, where the truth falls somewhere between.
But what if the biggest casualty in this Destino branding battle was — Salvador Dalí himself?
What if the film he wanted to make contained a much deeper more textured message? And a message — ripe for our times.
Ron Barbagallo, the Director of The Research Library at Animation Art Conservation, endeavors to prove that is exactly the case. As a follow up to his 2017 Society of Animation Studies Keynote speech at Padova University (Destino, and the Fate of Assembling Plastic Truths into a Greater Whole), Barbagallo offers a full analysis of his Destino Animatic in a peer reviewed essay published in the Society for Animation Studies Journal for Animation History and Theory.
Barbagallo's essay endeavors to restore truth to Dalí’s narrative, and by doing so, restore the sexuality to the film Salvador Dalí wanted the world to see. In his essay for the Society for Animation Studies Journal for Animation History and Theory, Barbagallo further endeavors to answer this question:
How many drawings of male ejaculation did Salvador Dalí create for his Disney film Destino?
Barbagallo says the peer reviewed answer is — No less than FOUR.
Ron Barbagallo
rmb@animationartconservation.com
Director, The Research Library at Animation Art Conservation
www.animationartconservation.com