Saludos Amigos (1942)

Oh boy. Here we go. Today is when we start the Wartime period of Disney Animation’s history. I’ll admit that I’ve been dreading this moment since we’ve started this project, as it’s filled with a bunch of movies that the average person probably hasn’t heard of, much less seen. And on that note, we start today with Saludos Amigos.

Original Poster Sourced via IMDB

Summary: Saludos Amigos is much like Fantasia in that there’s not really a since narrative. Instead we have a collection of shorts. Whereas Fantasia is a collection of shorts tied together and synched with music, Saludos Amigos is a collection of shorts with a theme of South America, particularly Brazil, Chile, Peru and Argentina.

The movie has a loose framing of live action film scenes with a newsreel-style narration over it. This narration continues into some of the shorts, but not all of them. Also, as a word of warning, this is Disney’s shortest feature, so there won’t be a ton to write about here.

Lake Titicaca

As an opener, I thought this was a relatively good short, following Donald Duck as he wanders around Peru and the eponymous Lake Titicaca. As he learns about the culture here, so too do we. There’s some decent information to learn and some okay slapstick humor, but the animation is nothing to write home about.

Pedro

Probably my second favorite short of the bunch. Centered around a little plane named Pedro, it presents a fairly standard “Little Engine that Could”-esque story where he has to make his first trip to pick up the mail. In his flight, he gets a little careless and flies too close to the scary mountain Aconcagua. After struggling to survive the terrible whether conditions the mountain brings, he barely makes it back home and completes his mission. The animation is a little better than most of the other shorts, but I can’t help shake the feeling that this is just a bog standard animated short. Apparently, Disney felt the same way, as it was re-released as it’s own independent short in 1955.

El Gaucho Goofy

Despite this featuring my favorite regular Disney character, Goofy, this is my least favorite short of the bunch. It was interesting learning about the tradition of Gauchos, but the animation isn’t great and the plotting is tired. Goofy’s silly nature just seems to be at odd with the almost strictly educational nature of the narration. Overall, just left a bad taste in my mouth.

Aquarela do Brasil

This was, by far, my favorite short of the bunch. The art was actually interesting, the animation is pretty fluid, and the music was decent. It reminds me of a lower-rate Fantasia short. Good colors and fun transitions. It also introduces a brand new character, José Carioca. Just an interesting little short; not as educational as others, but a bit more fun.

Overall, the movie is just a bit bland. It feels like a short. Not even an extended short, just a short, like you’d see in between movies at the theatre in the 1940s. There’s nothing particularly bad, but there’s just nothing particularly good. Overall, a decent watch, but I wouldn’t seek it out for anything more than the historical context.

-CJ

This week we took a look into Saludos Amigos. I’d never seen this film up to this point, but I knew a little about it’s back ground. Saludos Amigos was a film that was commissioned by the U.S. Government during WWII to promote ties with South America, who were friendly with the Germans. The film was made mostly to draw attention to South America, and to try and build ties and friendship between them and the US. Knowing this, it’s pretty easy to see the correlation and what Disney was trying to accomplish here, but where does it stand on its own?

Saludos Amigos isn’t like any Disney film we’ve seen before. It’s one-third live action, and two-thirds animation, and truthfully I wish it’d just stay all live action. The film opens up and plays the movie up as a documentary about three areas of South America, and then proceeds to throw animation in where it deems it necessary. I’ll admit, I don’t even really like the animation here. It’s the sort of lower standard animation that you’d get out of any Disney short at the time, and the half-assed transitions, and over dramatic voice overs don’t lend it any help. Even the shorts they’ve placed in the movie don’t have anything special to them, with the exception of the last short “Aquarela do Brasil” which was my favorite short of this entire film.

“Lake Titicaca” “Pedro” and “El Gaucho Goofy” are all very standard for Disney. Donald loses his temper, Goofy gets into wacky hi-jinks, and the story for “Pedro” is hardly original. All together it feels as though there’s no originality, through any of the film, and the only thing I really liked about these shorts was the facts that were overlayed on them. I really tried to find anything that I did like about these shorts, but the rough, and janky transitions, and the choppy bits of animation left me really disliking most of what this film had to offer.

The only redeeming bit that this movie had to offer was “Aquarela do Brasil”. The short itself is exactly what this movie should’ve stuck with. We get an animator working at his desk, paining a landscape of Brazil in witch Donald Duck and Jose Carioca interact with. The music is nice and upbeat and doesn’t sound like the elevator music we’ve been listing to through out this entire film. The colors are nice and bright, and it feels like an environment where the cast should be.

This was an incredibly short movie, and while I really did want to like it, it leaves me extremely disappointed. It’s not a bad film, but it’s just so disorientating, and confusing that I just kind of want to forget it. The animation isn’t special, the short stories that are in this are lacking in any sense of originality, and coming off of Bambi, that was visually very striking and easy to get into, it just feels like Disney took a massive nose dive. In every way shape and form this has been my least favorite Disney film to date.

My last thoughts - This film would’ve been much better if Disney had either done a straight documentary or a straight film about Donald and Goofy being stranded in Brazil.

-AJ