The Salvador Dalí film "too surreal" to produce has finally been made – by AI

The great Spanish and Catalan surrealist Salvador Dalí didn't only produce canvases and sculptures. He also worked on several movies, but his most ambitious was never made.

Back in 1937, Dalí came up with the idea for Giraffes on Horseback Salad. Harpo Marx was to play a Spanish aristocrat who falls in lover with a beautiful woman who's face is never seen. There would be flaming giraffes, and Harpo would use a butterfly net to capture dwarfs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Marx Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer decided the film was too surreal to make. But they didn't have access to AI image generators.

Giraffes on Horseback Salad, Inspired by Salvador Dalí’s Screenplay | Official Trailer - YouTube

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Florida's Dalí Museum and the ad agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners have used Google's DeepMind Veo 2 generative video model to finally make Dalí's Giraffes on Horseback Salad. So far, they've only released a trailer, but they say a full film is coming soon.

It will be intriguing to see the full piece because so far AI video generation really only serves for trailers like this, which combine short unrelated clips with not narrative continuity.

I guess that if any genre is suited to the glitchy hallucinations of AI video generation, it's Dalí's dream-inspired surrealism, where coherence may not be of paramount importance. But I'm wondering how close to Dalí's vision it's really going to be. Why's there a long shot of a woman pouting at the camera if the 'beauty' of Giraffes on Horseback Salad is supposed to go unseen?

At the same time, I can't help thinking that the piece would look so much better if it hadn't been made with AI. That might have been impossible in 1937, but today's VFX artists and animators are more than up to job of creating it with the best animation software or even in a game engine (just check out the surreal Severance title sequence).

The aims seems to be as much to promote the power of DeepMind Veo 2 as to show Dalí's vision. But then Florida's Dalí Museum likes to make attention-grabbing use of AI. In our roundup of the best deepfakes, we mention its resurrection of Dalí himself.

What's most fitting is that this kind of stunt would probably have pleased publicity-loving Dalí, who designed the Chupa-Chups logo and even appeared in adverts for chocolate.

Giraffes on Horseback Salad was supposed to be a riff on "the continuous struggle between the imaginative life as depicted in the old myths and the practical and rational life of contemporary society". I guess AI is now very much part of the latter.

There have been several attempts to bring Dalí's concept to life before. The original screenplay was believed lost, then it turned out it was never actually written, but in he mid-2010s an 84-page notebook with Dalí's ideas was found at the Centre Pompidou. Josh Frank developed a screenplay with Tim Heidecker, and this was turned into a graphic novel with artwork by the Spanish illustrator Manuela Pertega.

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