D52 Week 7: The Three Caballeros!

It's really hard for me to talk about The Three Caballeros without repeating what I said about Saludos Amigos last week. Several weeks down the line, I just might find myself struggling to remember which bits were in which film. (The fact that package films are rarely able to find their own voice in the first place certainly doesn't help matters!) The 1940s for Disney were definitely more interesting behind-the-scenes than on the big screen, being turned into a propaganda machine, followed by a string of odd compilations cobbled together in a desperate attempt to gradually become profitable again. A film about that period in Disney history could be easily more interesting than the films from that period in Disney history.

The main thing differentiating this film from Saludos Amigos is, amazingly, a less coherent unifying narrative. Yes, less coherent than "a bunch of artists go to South America and draw slightly stereotypical pictures of the people there and, haha, customs". It's not hard to notice the weird shift in tone and style after the two one-off shorts are out of the way, as the notion of distinct segments is put on the back burner of Disney's wacky sombrero-wearing cartoon stove in favour of a weird stream-of-consciousness mesh of Fantasia-esque Latin musical segments and not-yet-perfected cartoons-interacting-with-live-action-humans hijinks. If Saludos Amigos is a bland lasagna that alternates between layers of noodle and meaty cheesy sauce, The Three Caballeros is a bland lasagna where the sauce and the noodles are served as entirely different courses. Or, um, a more Latin American version of that analogy.

The division perhaps isn't so evident at first. The movie that Donald Duck watches is structured so similarly to this film's predecessor, with its fetish for narration, that you might not notice right away that there's no live-action documentary material this time. I admit that I'm only fully conscious of this in hindsight. Quality-wise, the two shorts are definitely not as interesting as the best of Saludos Amigos. "The Cold-Blooded Penguin" possesses a certain charm (primarily thanks to Sterling Holloway), but on the whole, it's pretty insubstantial entertainment. The biggest problem it has is glossing over the single most interesting thing contained therein: the Galápagos Islands! I would've rather been educated on the fascinating flora and fauna found there, Pablo being an allusion to Galápagos Penguins and all, than a simplified lesson on the geography of South America's western coast. Is it just me? I can't imagine that it's just me.

It's particularly frustrating when you realise that they immediately follow that segment up with some brief talk of how interesting the animals of the Amazon Rainforest are (complete with talk of toucans "making love", which....means something different now). How hard would it have been to make the tortoise on Pablo's island suitably huge, really? At least acknowledge the tortoises that gave the archipelago its name! I also have to wonder if the animators behind "The Cold-Blooded Penguin" were legitimately unaware that penguins are actually extremely adept swimmers, or if they just chose to ignore this widely known fact for, um, "creative" reasons? It's probably never a good sign for your cartoon if it's so middling that I have to spend time thinking about cartoon logic. I will give that segment credit for one thing, though: I laughed out loud at the visual interpretation of Neptune as, um, the Santa Claus of the sea, I guess?

"The Flying Gauchito" has a different problem, suffering from retreading thematic territory, the noble gaucho, that was already covered in Saludos Amigos. No, making this gaucho diminutive doesn't make it feel any fresher. Unnamed Gauchito Boy's flying donkey is as cute as you could hope a winged cartoon donkey to be, but it's certainly no dress-wearing horse, that's for sure. At once, this segment manages to be less funny and less educational than "El Gaucho Goofy". But maybe it's unfair to live in the past like that. Maybe it would be more fair to judge "The Flying Gauchito" on its own merits! Like its ending, where a child is carried off by a feral animal, NEVER TO BE SEEN AGAIN. At least it teaches modern audiences that "burrito" doesn't always refer to something delicious?

It's at this point that the format changes entirely, focusing in almost solely on Donald Duck and the Two Less Famous Caballeros. That's not to say that there's any more focus on the story, of course. It's essentially a bunch of nonsense all linked by the general notion that Donald desperately wants to have intercourse with attractive Latin ladies but is hindered by his knack for hallucinating wildly every time he kisses one. (Ducks are nature's feathery little rapists, after all.) I admit, I found his horniness kinda uncomfortable after awhile, even as it clearly just existed to show how cool it was to have cartoons interacting with real humans. I haven't seen a majority of the old Donald Duck shorts, but I don't seem to recall him being such a one-note horndog elsewhere. If I'm wrong, please set me straight, preferably in a non-gross way!

As with many earlyish uses of any relatively new technique like this, there's such a reliance on the novelty of cartoon animals and non-cartoon peoplefolk that future audiences, used to seeing this sort of thing, will be disappointed that there's not much else at all to grab onto. (Aside from hot 1940s Latina booty.) The biggest offender is probably the stuff with the flying serape, which is just boringness incarnate - aside from the weird joke where José mines gunning down women with his umbrella, which is instead confusingness incarnate. Even the "Os Quindins de Yayá" song with Aurora Miranda, the most well handled half-animated half-live-action portion of the film, clearly went on too long in the end.

As for the hallucinating: Donald's weird habit of tripping out when kissed by sexy ladies is cute early with Miranda. It's far less cute half an hour later, when they go completely overboard with some chick's disembodied head in flowers and an aggressive onslaught of atonal abstractive excess. On one hand, this sequence is actually really technically proficient, as this lower budget movie goes, with things like the dancing cacti looking genuinely impressive. On the other hand, though, "proficient" and "impressive" don't automatically mean "pleasant"; it's another case where there's no substance beneath the gimmicky surface to grasp onto, which somehow makes the entire hallucination even more unsettling. I think it's fairly obvious that Disney didn't intend to make us associate Latin America with psychological trauma, so this impressive sequence impressively failed at what it set out to do, in so many ways. And then the film ends, bizarrely, with José Carioca trying to blow up Donald Duck with a fake bull made of fireworks. For some reason. It's hard not to take that scene overly seriously when the lighting they've chosen is so subtle malevolent!

The obvious point of comparison in comparing any two similar things (like apples and oranges) is, "Which is better?" In the case of Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, it's hard to tell. The former's shorts are generally stronger, whereas the latter put more effort into its weirdly structured framing story. Caballeros has a total lack of pacing working against it, whereas Amigos suffers from being crazily short for a feature film. If I were pressed to make a decision, I'd probably say that this is the superior film; for all its faults, it was clearly a more ambitious production and, if nothing else, it is at least interesting for its unprecedented hair-pulling weirdness as far as Disney features are concerned. But why choose between the two? If you want to watch one, you might as well watch both, to fully appreciate what an odd position the studio was in during WWII. It's extremely hard for me to recommend them as movies (though, who doesn't at least sort of like Donald Duck?), but at an oddball piece of history in a terribly serious era, they just might be worth experiencing after all.

I apologise for being especially wordy and rambly this week. I don't know what's wrong with me.

Seriously, Pablo just rubs me completely the wrong way.

UNNECESSARY AND UNWELCOME DIRECT-TO-DVD AND BLU-RAY DISNEY SEQUEL IDEA: In The Three Políticos, José brags that Brazil has elected a female president, and Donald totally wants to get in on that action. In a series of educational shorts, Donald learns all about the exciting inner workings of various Latin American governments, as José and Panchito continue to plot his comical demise. Eventually, he finally becomes knowledgeable enough to earn a super-trippy meeting with President Dilma Rousseff, as herself. By the way, this time Panchito Pistoles is played by the dude who voiced the Taco Bell chihuahua, naturally. (No, seriously, he is. I mean, for realsies, he is!)