SAN FRANCISCO  — It turns out the man behind Mickey Mouse liked quirky cats.

Besides his love of wholesome entertainment, Walt Disney also had an appreciation for the eccentric that led to a short-lived partnership and decades-long friendship with surrealistic artist Salvador Dali.

Although their styles and personalities were dramatically different, Disney and Dali shared a fascination with the fantastic. They brought their vivid imaginations together shortly after World War II to work on an animated feature called “Destino,” which wasn’t completed until long after their deaths.

Even after they abandoned “Destino,” the two artists remained in touch and even traveled to each other’s homes, swapping fishing stories and periodically discussing plans to make a movie based on “Don Quixote.” That dream was never realized. Disney died in 1966. Dali, who was three years younger, died in 1989.

The improbable bond between the mastermind of Disneyland and the Spanish painter of reality-bending images will be explored in an exhibit running from July 10 through Jan. 3 at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco. It will then shift to the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

The exhibit will feature “Destino” storyboards, letters exchanged between the two men, photographs, voice recordings and rarely seen artwork, including a drawing of Don Quixote that Dali did for Disney in 1957 inside a book, Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”

“This will show an angle of Walt that people don’t normally think of — he wasn’t just all about family-friendly stuff,” says filmmaker Ted Nicolaou, the exhibit’s curator. “He wasn’t dark, but he dealt in dreams and fantastical images. He was a man ready to experiment in any way possible.”

Dali, a pioneer in Europe’s surrealistic movement, thought Disney might be a kindred spirit when he saw some of Disney’s early animation in the “Silly Symphony” series that ran from 1929 through 1939. Nicolaou said a “Silly Symphony” skit featuring dancing skeletons particularly appealed to Dali, whose paintings of melting clocks, apparitions, monsters and other creatures often border on the hallucinogenic.