The year was 1941, and the hostilities in Europe had shut down crucial economic markets upon which American business had depended. Rockefeller's mission was to open up new economic opportunities in Latin America to replace the lost ones in Europe. That, and there were was the little matter of all those German and Italian immigrants in Latin America, whose ethnic allegiances threatened to create Axis sympathies right at America' s doorstep. In other words, there was a dual mission: open up Latin American markets, and encourage the region to think of its common bonds with its neighbor to the north before thinking of any bonds to the fascist monsters to the east.
How best to achieve these lofty goals, you ask? Well, cartoon animals, of course.
And so it came to pass that Mr. John Hay Whitney, Rockefeller's representative on behalf of the Motion Picture Division of the CIAA, went to Walt Disney and urged him to take a goodwill tour of Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Brazil. The world loves your films, Mr. Disney, you're an ideal ambassador for American values in these trying times.
Perhaps under different circumstances, Disney might have eagerly accepted the assignment. But 1941 was an awfully tough year for Walt. Sure, the world loved his films--but they were insanely expensive things to make, and took years. And when the war cut off so much of the European market, it decimated his revenues. Other film studios could cut budgets to try to make ends meet, but there was a certain threshold below which he could not go and still turn out the colorful animated fantasies that audiences expected. He was facing crippling debts, and his artistic staff was picketing for higher wages. Disney told the feds he simply could not afford to go gallivanting around Central and Southern America on a lark.
To sweeten the pot, Whitney agreed to put up $70,000 towards Disney's travel expenses. On top of that, he said that if Disney made some short films during or inspired by the tour, aimed at Latin American audiences, he would promise advance payments of $50,000 per short for up to five shorts.
In August, four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor would bring the U.S. formally into the war, Disney set off to Rio de Janeiro with his wife and a team of crack artists and story developers. He had visions of making as many as twelve Latin-themed shorts, but the tour was still in its early days when Disney worked out a new plan in correspondence with fellow movie mogul David O. Selznick: he would package together sets of four shorts with travelogue footage from the tour to make a sort of ad hoc feature film. Features made more money than shorts, and Disney's flow of features was stuttering thanks to his debts and the artists' strike. He'd already experimented with mixing live action and animated shorts in the form of The Reluctant Dragon (1941). That experiment had not been especially well-received critically, but it was a decent enough proof of concept.
The first Latin package film, Saludos Amigos, came out in 1943. The Three Caballeros was the second film in the cycle.
In general terms, The Three Caballeros resembled its predecessor. Saludos Amigos paired Donald Duck with a samba-loving parrot named Jose Carioca, so the "sequel" brings back both Donald and Jose and adds a third caballero in the form of a gun-happy rooster named Panchito. There is a loose narrative framework in the form of Donald birthday gifts from friends in Latin America--and so the otherwise disconnected sequences unfold with Donald as an onscreen audience surrogate.
The Disney team developed other sequences, such as "The Laughing Gauchito" and "San Blas Boy," in anticipation of future films. In all, Disney's team mapped out as many as ten additional Latin-themed segments that were never completed. Donald and Jose were reunited in "Blame it on the Samba," which had actually been shot for a planned third film that would have sent them to Cuba, but was ultimately screened as part of a different "package" film called Melody Time.
Neither Saludos Amigos nor The Three Caballeros were warmly received by the press. Bosley Crowther, the influential reviewer from The New York Times called it "a firecracker show which dazzles and numbs the senses without making any tangible sense." This was among the nicer things that critics said about it. For his part, Walt Disney himself was happy to see the back of these--he rankled at working on commission, no matter how noble the motive. He'd fulfilled his obligation to the State Department and was free to return to developing the fairy tales that were closest to his heart. With Germany's surrender a few months after Three Caballeros opened, and the end of the war worldwide by year's end, the markets available for Disney to reach were looking more expansive, and hungry, than ever before.
Which is not to say that Disney left the package films behind--there were more of those yet to come (the aforementioned Melody Time, Make Mine Music, and Fun & Fancy Free). The legacy of Three Caballeros was felt more importantly however in other ways. Because if you ignored the critics and asked Disney's artistic staff (like Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, or Mary Blair) what they thought of Three Caballeros, you'd find that they considered it one of the most daring and experimental of works.
The Three Caballeros indulged in surreal and psychedelic imagery, three-dimensional animation, limited animation, and the most extensive and technically challenging mixing of live action with animation the studio had ever attempted.
Previous works like The Reluctant Dragon and Saludos Amigos simply alternated between live-action sequences and cartoon segments, but Three Caballeros put both on screen at once in the same frame. There was precedent for this. Back in the days before the advent of Mickey Mouse, a young Walt Disney had developed the Alice Comedies in which a live young girl cavorted with cartoon pals in a cartoon universe.
For Three Caballeros, however, the technical staff pulled out the stops to design a way for live actors and cartoons to interact on sets that are both partially "real" and partially animated. The layering of elements was unprecedented in scope.
This led to another source of some critical discomfort, as some reviewers were discomfited by the sight of Donald Duck lusting after live human women like Brazilian singer Aurora Miranda. The idea that a two-dimensional drawing of a cartoon animal could be given enough life by the artists and integrated so thoroughly into the same frame as Miranda that his interest in her feels real enough to be kind of icky is itself a testament to the skill of the Disney team and a sign they were genuinely doing something new. The sequence in which Miranda kisses Donald, triggering orgasmic explosions of color and spiraling phallic shapes as her dancers transform into fighting roosters (insert your own synonym for "rooster" here as needed) can be called a lot of things--risque, bizarre, colorful, gonzo, tasteless--but certainly not familiar, and anything but conventional.
Having explored these techniques in the low-stakes environment of Three Caballeros, the Disney team was in a position to use them with greater mastery in subsequent pictures like Song of the South (1946) and Mary Poppins (1964).
By David Kalat
Sources:
Christopher Finch, The Art of Walt Disney: From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdom.
Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons.
Charles Solomon, The Disney That Never Was.
Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life.
