Disneyology

Disneyology 201: The “Package” Films

When I did my “Disneyology 101” marathon I had one simple goal: see every one of Disney’s feature length animated films. That was pretty ambitious, especially in the days before Disney+ when I had to track down all those movies (including some in “the vault”) mostly on physical media. Though I did watch 42 movies for that I did make some concessions to keep things going, namely that I did not watch any of the “features” Disney made between 1942 and 1950, which were a collection of rather compromised works that are often dubbed “the package films.” These movies were made at a difficult time for Disney when they were financially decimated by not being able to release their expensive post-Snow White features in Europe because of the war and also lost a lot of employees to the draft and on top of all that were just coming off rather demoralizing strike that left a lot of bitter feelings for all involved. With all this going on they wouldn’t be able to make any more huge productions like Pinocchio, or Bambi, or even Dumbo. Instead they focused on making short films which they could then “package” together into features which would at least keep the division alive. When doing “Disneyology 101” I opted to skip these movies because they didn’t sound like true features and frankly watching them seemed like it would be a bit of a speed bump to getting to the more famous works that I really wanted to learn about. However, most canonical lists of Disney’s features does include them so if I was going to say “I’ve seen every animated Disney feature” with true credibility I was going to have to watch them… and that’s what I intend to do with this installment of Disneyology 201

Saludos Amigos (1942)/ The Three Caballeros (1944)



During World War II Disney was widely involved in the making educational films for the armed forces as well as propaganda films for the general public. Wartime propaganda efforts were also the genesis for the first two of Disney’s “package” films: 1942’s Saludos Amigos and 1944’s The Three Caballeros, two movies that have similar origins and can probably be talked about together. These movies were the result of an attempt by the State Department to get Walt Disney involved in their “Good Neighbor” initiative, which was an attempt to increase soft power in Latin America (after years of being very bad neighbors, both before and after) so as to keep them on the side of the allies during a time when Nazi Germany was doing a lot of outreach themselves. As part of this effort they had Walt Disney himself along with a cadre of other animators and Disney employees go on a good will tour of South America where he’d visit the sights, speak at schools, and generally act as a positive example of American culture. This tour is said to have gone very well for most involved and while there they shot some documentary footage and took a lot of notes that would then be used for a film when they got back to Los Angeles which would also be aimed at encouraging Western hemisphere unity.

The first film they made when they got home was Saludos Amigos, which only runs about 43 minutes, which only barely qualifies it as a feature under Academy definitions and is the shortest “feature” the studio ever made. The film uses Disney’s real life tour of Latin America as a sort of framing story and uses footage of their trip interspersed between the animated segments. The whole film has kind of a faux documentary motif with a fairly deadpan narrator talking over most of the film and explaining the various cultural aspects that the film is riffing on. There are four main sequences: The first features Donald Duck messing around with a lama near Lake Titicaca in Peru. The next segment looks at the Chilean air mail service (which film fans may recognize from the 1939 film Only Angels Have Wings), which is depicted by these sentient airplanes (which are oddly similar to the cars from Cars) and in particular a junior plane named Pedro who goes on his first flight when his parents are “sick.” Next we go to Argentina for a short where Goofy is playing a cowboy who is transported to South America and becomes a Gaucho. Finally we end on a sequence in Brazil which introduces José Carioca, an anthropomorphized parrot who dances through Rio de Janeiro with Donald Duck.

That last segment is almost certainly the most notable and incorporates some really nice looking watercolors and generally makes 1940s Rio look really cool. The other segments have their charms as well; Pedro is a cute little story and the gaucho story does a good job of incorporating more traditional cartoon gags into this cultural milieu. Having said that, this is a movie which is by its nature a bunch of white Americans depicting foreign countries and it’s not hard to see how that could go spectacularly wrong. The film is certainly a tourist-eye view of these countries, something the film makes no bones about, and it generally looks for the aspects of these countries that are exotic and arguably stereotypical. What’s more there is kind of something kind of condescending about the hole framing story of this thing in that the film essentially has American animators “mansplaining” these country’s cultures to them by a narrator. On the other hand, they do seem to have done a decent amount of research while on their trip and get a lot of visual detail right and are careful to frame everything as positively as possible, this is after all a film that was commissioned by the state department to be as flattering to the Latin American world as possible and it reportedly proved to be fairly educational to American audiences who previously weren’t aware of how urban and developed parts of South America could be.

Personally I found Saludos Amigos to be an interesting, albeit rather inessential, curio. It’s so short that it hardly really feels like you could call it a real feature film, but it also means that the film never really wears out its welcome. The same cannot be said by the studio’s follow-up The Three Caballeros, which runs about 71 minutes and which I frankly lost patience with pretty quickly. The film drops the faux-documentary framing and instead starts with a framing narrative about Donald Duck getting things sent to him that transition into shorts but then it kind of drops this and instead takes more of a stream of conscious approach with Donald, José, and a new avian ambassador: a Mexican rooster named Panchito Pistoles. There are a number of sequences here which juxtapose these animated characters against live action, a technique that would eventually be used again in the infamous Song of the South, and the animators really go nuts with this to the point where a whole lot of the film is just these birds fucking around in front of b-roll of Brazilians on the beach; it’s an oddly horny film at times with Donald frequently ogling human women all over the place. None of these characters are really conversationalists and there’s no narrator so it’s a pretty visual experience, but not really in much of an elegant way. Frankly I found it all kind of tiresome after not too long, but on some level this film might work a bit better for the original “good neighbor” aims of the whole project. Instead of condescendingly explaining these cultures like Saludos Amigos did it simply lets its multicultural cartoon characters act wackily in harmony without too much of a language barrier to overcome... but that doesn’t mean I actually enjoyed it and for someone trying to look back on these for scholarly purposes in 2021 The Three Caballeros was definitely the less enjoyable viewing experience.

Saludos Amigos: **1/2 out of Five

The Three Caballeros: *1/2 out of Five