Destino original production
Disney and Salvador Dalí built a surreal short, then stopped after months of design and animation; it was completed by another generation decades later.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Never Born
- Peak stage
- full production started
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
The original Walt Disney–Salvador Dalí animated short production developed during the 1940s.
Dalí and Disney artist John Hench created extensive paintings, story material and a short animation test. The wartime-era studio stopped the production before a finished short emerged.
Existence timeline
Dalí joins Disney artists to develop a surreal animated short.
Paintings, drawings and story ideas define the production.
A short moving-image sequence demonstrates the intended style.
The studio abandons the unfinished short.
A new Disney team completes a film using the original archive.
Why it ended
Financial pressure and changing anthology plans ended the original production in 1946. Disney artists later reconstructed and completed Destino in 2003.
Last confirmed trace
Original paintings, storyboards and the surviving test remain distinct from the later completed short.
What it left behind
The eventual completion made the project a rare case where an archive enabled revival while preserving a clear boundary between original and successor production.
How we classified it
The proposed archive unit never reached ordinary public access in the form being documented.
The strongest verified milestone maps to full_production_started under Arrival Score V1.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.