Surrealist painter Salvador Dali and Disney began their collaboration on Destino (Destiny)in 1945. The animated short was painted for 8 months until the second world war ended the project.
In 1999, Roy E. Disney (nephew of Walt Disney) decided to revive the forgotten project while working on Fantasia 2000. Disney combined traditional (hand-drawn) animation and computer graphics to bring Dali’s surreal vision to life.
Fear and Loathing has one of the best trip scenes of any drug involved movie. The entire movie is pretty much one long drug-fueled crazy adventure.
The film has become a true cult smash and is sampled over and over again in popular culture from music, to art to just about anywhere psychedelic drugs are involved.
A film that screams “product of its time,” The Holy Mountain was Alejandro Jodorowsky’s dizzying elegy to the sex, drugs and spiritual awakening of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
A Christ-like vagrant and thief wanders through a perverse and unfriendly land until he encounters an enlightened one, who gathers the thief and six of the world’s most powerful individuals for a spiritual pilgrimage. If you want to see the conquest of Mexico re-enacted by reptiles, soldiers shoot innocent people as birds fly from their wounds, and a wizard turn feces into gold, this is the movie for you.
The central members of the cast were said to have spent three months doing various spiritual exercises guided by Oscar Ichazo of the Arica Institute. The Arica training features Zen, Sufi and yoga exercises along with eclectic concepts drawn from the Kabbalah, the I Ching and the teachings of Gurdjieff.
After the training, the group lived for one month communally in Jodorowsky’s home before shooting began.
As far as trippy bizarre movies go – this takes the cake.
1940 – Over 7 decades ago, and still one of the top psychedelic animated films ever made. The third feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, the film consists of eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, seven of which are performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Fantasia and mind enhancing drugs go together like peanut butter and jelly. These days it is quite popular to discover what music synchs with Fantasia. Much like people do with Pink Floyds’ music synched to the Wizard Of Oz. Disney jumped on the 60’s hippy style and re-imaged the movie in the late 60s with a very different promotional poster, which includedmagic mushrooms.
Another music based film, Yellow Submarine is a 1968 British animated feature film based on the music of The Beatles. It is also the title for the soundtrack album to the feature film, released as part of The Beatles’ music catalog.
The film received a widely positive reception from critics and audiences alike. It is also credited with bringing more interest in animation as a serious art form.
The animation of Yellow Submarine has sometimes falsely been attributed to the famous psychedelic pop art artist of the era, Peter Max, but the film’s art director was Heinz Edelmann.
2001 contains one of the most memorable trippy scenes to ever hit cinema screens. Doubly impressive when considering it was made with 1968 technology.
As the film climaxes, the main character takes a trip through deep space that involves the innovative use of slit-scan photography to create the stunning visual effects. Known to staff as “Manhattan Project”, the shots of various nebula-like phenomena, including the expanding star field, were colored paints and chemicals swirling in a pool-like device known as a cloud tank, shot in slow-motion in a dark room.
Dave MacDowell’s art melds satire with an unapologetic wit.
The style of MacDowell’s work pairs surreal visuals with deliberately recognizable pop culture references to transform the known into a hilarious commentary on society.
Disney Brainwash
The Last Friday
Pryor on Fire
AM: And you are entirely self taught. What methods did you use to educate yourself in the art of making a good painting? You seem to have a wonderful, and quite individual, grasp on color theory…
DM: Downloading color wheels from the Internet, and struggling with the illusion that I was doing it right. As a career decision from the start, I decided to always use a small script brush to make the work super detailed, and to keep the themes varied and entertaining. – Dave Macdowell, Arrested Motion
Seven in the Box
Saving the Princess
Bad Motha Eraserhead
AM: Some of the great lowbrow painters such as Robt Williams and Todd Schorr must be a huge inspiration to you. Where else do your significant inspirations lie?
DM: I need to tell stories and express what I feel. I always figured that if everything was painted really well, you could say whatever you wanted. I think hidden behind a lot of my candy colored pieces are revolutionary slants leaning toward the misfits and underdogs. Subtle jabs at Classism, racism, greed and commodified sexuality. It’s all in there, but never in your face. – Dave Macdowell, Arrested Motion
Hendrix in Wonderland
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Imagine
Alice in Limbo
The Dude Abides
The Dude
When Yoko Ate Ringo
AM: You had a dalliance with Banksy and also the planned Banksy Unveiling show in the UK not too long back. How did that come about and what happened?
DM: Banksy wrote and said he was a fan of my stuff years ago on Myspace {Remember Myspace anyone?}. My friend in London curated a show with the pitch of revealing the guy. Of course they never did, it was all cheeky fun. Banksy and those guys are all tight anyway, so their Broken Britain madness continues. – Dave Macdowell, Arrested Motion
Ralph Steadman is a cartoonist best known for his work with author Hunter S. Thompson, drawing pictures for several of his articles and books. Steadman is respected for the messages in his political and social cartoons.
Awards that he has won for his work include the Francis Williams Book Illustration Award for Alice in Wonderland and Illustrator of the Year by the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1979.
Hunter S Thompson, Words – Ralph Steadman
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Ralph Steadman
Alice in Wonderland – Ralph Steadman
Alice in Wonderland, Hookah – Ralph Steadman
Optimus Hunter – Ralph Steadman
Little Boxes – Ralph Steadman
Earth Belly – Ralph Steadman
Pill Culture – Ralph Steadman
Trippin in Las Vegas – Ralph Steadman
Hunter S Thompson – Ralph Steadman
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Ride – Ralph Steadman
Take a look back in time with these great iconic images from History and Pop Culture.
Salvador Dali
At the end of his shoot with artist Salvador Dali — a session that took six hours and 28 throws (of water, a chair, and three cats), “my assistants and I were wet, dirty and near complete exhaustion,” photographer Philippe Halsman reported. The resulting image, with a leaping Dali in midair amid the madness, is a portrait as kinetic and surreal as artist’s own work.
Frozen Niagara Falls
The Fall of the Berlin Wall
Young Beatles
View from the Window at Le Gras 1826 (First Photo Ever Taken)
Pablo Picasso
For this 1949 portrait of Pablo Picasso in his studio in the south of France, the artist was inspired by Gjon Mili’s previous photos of ice skaters spinning through the air with small lights attached to their skates. Mili left the shutters of his cameras open as Picasso made ephemeral drawings in the air of a darkened room. This one was of one of a centaur. Mili caught the artist himself by using a 1/10,000th-second strobe light. This photo ranks among LIFE’s best partly because it actually captures the moment of creation by a genius.
Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris
Elvis in the Army
Charlie Chaplin and Ghandi
Google Launches in 1999
Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly
Backstage at the Academy Awards, two past Best Actress winners, Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, await their turns to present. That Allan Grant could catch both supremely elegant, stylish icons together in a moment may have been a stroke of luck (Hepburn and Kelly never did work together, and very soon after this photo was taken the latter left Hollywood to become Monaco’s princess). But Grant’s use of composition and lighting — with the two women parallel and glowing in profile — is nothing short of masterful.
First Ever Free space walking, using the Manned Maneuvering Unit by Bruce McCandless – 1984
Construction of Disneyland
The First Computer Ever
John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy
Then-U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy confers with his brother Robert F. Kennedy in a hotel suite during the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. Looking at Hank Walker’s image today, through the filter of all we know now — that Jack would indeed win the nation’s highest office, with Bobby by his side as his most trusted adviser; that the brothers would navigate the United States through almost three years of magic and turbulence; that each man would be cut down by an assassin’s bullet by decade’s end — the poignancy is astonishing. And yet, even without the context of that history, the photo, with all its fascinating details and near-perfect composition, stands alone as powerfully