As documented in Neal
Gabler's essential Walt Disney biography Walt Disney: Triumph Of The
American Imagination,
at a certain point in the '40s, the quixotic quest for perfection that fueled Snow
White And The Seven Dwarves was replaced by a pragmatic struggle for survival. No film
better represents this new ethos than 1942's Saludos Amigos, a brief, 40-minute feature
commissioned by the U.S. government as part of its "Good Neighbor" policy toward
its neighbors to the south. Amigos sandwiches four pedestrian animated
shorts—two featuring Donald Duck, one featuring a Gaucho Goofy, and the
fourth starring a family of anthropomorphic planes—inside agonizingly
dull travelogue footage of Disney writers, artists, and musicians on a research
trip, exploring all that Latin and South America have to offer. The stale,
joy-killing odor of the classroom hangs heavy over Saludos Amigos: it aspires to educate and
entertain, but fails on both counts.
Perhaps it's best to think
of Saludos Amigos as
little more than a test-run for its longer, more ambitious 1944 sequel The
Three Caballeros, a giddy
animators' showcase about birthday boy Donald Duck running amok in Mexico with
feathered friends José Carioca and Panchito. Where the prequel is
weighed down with noble intentions, Caballeros boasts a breezy,
exhilarating lightness and a refreshing undercurrent of perversity. Donald Duck
spends much of the film leering at live-action beauties in ways that would make
Tex Avery's Big Bad Wolf blush, Panchito is a sombrero-wearing, pistol-toting
maniac, and the film is graced by some of the trippiest, most casually
psychedelic animation this side of Fantasia. Freed from having to
convey ideas more involved than "Donald Duck goofs around in tropical locales
with his new buddies," the animators let their imaginations run wild, plunging
into delirious abstraction, kaleidoscopic compositions, and charmingly
primitive stabs at integrating animation and live-action. It's a holiday of a
movie animated by a sense of fun and frivolity that is blissfully universal.
Seldom has Disney's unofficial status as America's foremost goodwill ambassador
felt more official or justified.
Key features: A boring short about the
Disney gang's research trip, a pair of irreverent, Latin-and-South-America-themed
Donald Duck cartoons, and a too-brief excerpt from a CBC interview with Disney
about the films' origins.