When Dalí met Disney

The dreammakers ... Dalí and Disney. Photograph: © Disney

It makes sense - surrealist sense anyway - that Salvador Dalí was a fan of Harpo Marx, and it is not really surprising that Alfred Hitchcock, whose own nightmares ran to birds picking peoples' eyes out and hoteliers who keep Mother's corpse in the cellar, found common ground with the manic Catalan. What really is a novelty is to find out in Tate Modern's exhibition, Dalí and Film, that he worked with Walt Disney. It doesn't exactly confirm the cliched image of either man. Dalí the exhibitor of dead donkeys collaborating with Disney the promoter of family values? What on Earth did they find to say to each another?

In fact Dalí and Disney got along well enough to attempt two collaborations, and there are surprisingly large numbers of storyboard designs and paintings by Dalí in the Disney archives. These are in no sense a betrayal of Dalí's surrealism - rather a touching attempt to directly transfer the aesthetic of the pre-war European avant-garde to 1940s Hollywood. Far from the final corruption of the renegade surrealist the movement's leader André Breton nicknamed "Avida Dollars", Dalí's attempt to bring surrealist radicalism to a Disney cartoon has a striking quality of innocence and integrity - he really was trying to popularise modern art.

Disney, too, comes out of this story well, and let's face it, with intellectuals it's his image that needs the boost. Disney was not, as an artist, anything like the conservative all-American propagandist invented by hostile biographers. Whatever he was in his life, in his imagination he was sublimely audacious. His attempt to collaborate with Dalí was an avant-garde follow up to the Wagnerian ambition of Fantasia. Disney's films are full of surrealist moments: he even shared Dalí's obsession with bottoms. Forests of thorns, skull islands, dancing skeletons and clock-swallowing crocodiles abound in Disney's cinema which goes further than the surrealists ever could in unlocking the dream life of children and adults.

This is why Dalí loved cinema and wanted to work in Hollywood: because it is the Dream Factory. It is wonderful, and speaks well of both him and Hollywood, that he actually did get the opportunity to collaborate with Hitchcock and Disney, the two great mainstream dreammakers of 20th century cinema. Sometimes, on that silver screen, you can fly - or with this aborted project, at least flap your arms at the window.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/