The Three Caballeros (1944)

Director: Norman Ferguson, Clyde Geronomi, Jack Kinney, Bill Roberts, Harold Young

Cast: Aurora Miranda, Carmen Molina, Dora Luz

Synopsis: Donald receives his birthday gifts, which include traditional gifts and information about Brazil and Mexico.

The Three Caballeros is something of an oddity, produced by the Disney studio as part of a Good Neighbour policy intended to improve relations between the US and Latin/South America. The movie begins conventionally enough with Donald Duck receiving three gifts from South America, the first of which is a projector on which he watches a cartoon about a penguin who longs to live in a warmer climate. Then there’s the tale of a gaucho boy who befriends a flying donkey. Any nods towards conventionality are more or less forgotten somewhere around the halfway point as Donald is joined by Jose Carioca and Panchito, Brazilian and Mexican birds respectively, who whisk Donald away on a whistle-stop tour of their countries. From this point, The Three Caballeros probably most closely resembles Disney’s Fantasia in as much as what we see on the screen relates to the musical score. Donald spends a fair amount of time interacting with real humans, most of whom are comely South American females. To be honest, the little duck is something of a letch in this one, drooling over bikini-clad women and chasing after them. Fortunately, he fails to catch any. The movie is visually arresting, particularly the last 10 minutes which puts one in mind of the kind of psychedelic cartoons the Beatles might have experimented with in the 1960s.
(Reviewed 26th December 2014)