The amazing story of Walt Disney and Salvador Dali’s aborted collaboration.

Almost by chance, (Disney avoided Hollywood parties, preferring to don an engineer’s cap and chug around his estate on a scale-model railroad) he was introduced to Salvador and Gala Dali by Jack Warner at the movie mogul’s home one night in late 1945. The Dalis were staying with the Warners while the surrealist superstar painted their portraits. Somehow, Walt Disney, who had founded an empire based on wholesome, Midwestern family values, and Salvador Dali, who once vowed to “spit on the portrait of my mother,” hit it off, and a peculiar friendship of long standing was begun.

The match might not have been as odd as it at first seemed. For all his wholesomeness, Disney had been fascinated by avant-garde techniques and began experimenting with them in 1939. Critics praised Fantasia’s toccata-and-fugue sequence as reminiscent of Kandinsky and Miro. Hench supervised this sequence using abstract images for the first time in a Disney film.

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