That was an excellent one.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

"Saludos Amigos" (1942) and "The Three Caballeros" (1944) are really dreadful Walt Disney productions, which were made during World War II supposedly to improve relations between the United States and Latin American countries. Luckily in "The Three Caballeros" the action only takes place in Mexico and Brazil. Of course, there are some attractive things, such as the proto-psychedelic animation of Mary Blair that would flourish in "Alice in Wonderland" (Disney's most "stoned" feature, if you ask me), but almost by rule all is offensive: stereotypes, ridiculous characters or cultural mockery. All the plot offers is Donald Duck opening presents on his birthday, from two Latin American friends: Brazilian José Carioca (from "Saludos Amigos") and Mexican Panchito (Villa, I suppose). Each time a box is open you watch an animated sequence of native songs (including a horrendous English version of maestro Manuel Esperón's "Ay Jalisco no te rajes"). Donald Duck (who looks a lot like Donald Trump in his arrogant behavior) even harasses several Latin women, anticipating the days of his namesake. The only thing that seemed fantastic to me (and it's personal taste, of course) was Carmen Miranda's sister, the sinuous Aurora Miranda who sings and dances in a beautiful and colorful musical sequence composed by Ary Barroso. If Disney has kept "Song of the South" out of circulation because of "offensive treatment of African-American" this film could deserve the same medicine. However, the only thing Disney executives seem to find objectionable is that the characters smoke, so in the DVD edition cigars and cigarettes were deleted, except the one in José Carioca's peak... As "Saludos Amigos", it is a schematic, silly and ugly Disney you can ignore.

This is the seventh animated feature done by Walt Disney Animation Studio. There will be spoilers ahead:This film had its genesis from the success of Saludos Amigos, the film which came out of Walt Disney's decision to accept the US Department of State's request to go on a goodwill tour of South America. Disney saw it as a smart move from a business standpoint and the success of Amigos proved him right. From that success, The Three Caballeros was made.The structure of Caballeros is is a mix of live action and animation done in segments like Fantasia. It's episodic in nature within a framing sequence. It's Donald Duck's birthday and he receives several presents. A projector showing a documentary on birds leads things off. The appearances by the Aracaun Bird are enjoyable and make the film for me.Donald's friend Jose Carioca, a parrot from Brazil who first appeared in Saludos Amigos. He gives Donald a book through which they travel to Bahia, in Brazil. Donald falls in love there with a woman played by Carmen Miranda's sister Aurora.The third present is a rooster named Panchito, from Mexico, followed by a fourth present, a piñata. Panchito takes the three of them through a tour of Mexico, where Donald falls in love repeatedly with pretty girls in Mexico, lots of beautiful music is heard and lovely scenery is beheld.There are also a couple of short animated segments, one about a penguin named Pablo, who dreams of living someplace warm. Narrated by Sterling Holloway, it tells of Pablo's determined efforts to travel to someplace warmer than the South Pole and the other about a little boy in Uruguay, Gauchito and his flying donkey, Burrito. Both cartoons are cute and charming.The film as a whole is very effective and the music is excellently incorporated into the film segments, particularly in sync with the animation.This film is available on DVD, solo and in combination with Saludos Amigos and is well worth finding. Recommended.

I find it hard to believe that this was a World War II propaganda film. It doesn't really seem to fit that mold. Propaganda of the time was pretty heavy-handed, and most of it isn't all that entertaining today except as an artifact of the period. This movie is a joy to watch in its own right, and if there's an anti-fascist message embedded within, it's awfully subtle. My understanding was that this was Disney's attempt to open up Central and South America as a market for their films, since the war had pretty much eliminated the European market. Whatever its pedigree, though, this is one of the few Disney videos that I don't mind watching endlessly with the kids, especially the parts that involve the titular Caballeros. The movie is somewhat disjointed and episodic, but what holds it all together is good music. My least favorite episode is the story of the flying donkey, which gets old quickly, particularly since (and this is my one complaint) they chose to have a North American announcer attempt a Mexican accent. Why they could not have simply found an actual Mexican actor is beyond me - Los Angeles being in Mexico's backyard, after all. But Disney seemed to enjoy mixing and matching nationalities even into the 1960s, hiring, for example, US actors to play English characters in Mary Poppins, Treasure Island, and 101 Dalmatians; or Hayley Mills, who was a British actress who always seemed to be playing an American. In fact, the latter is something seen commonly nowadays, when it seems half the working actors in Hollywood are British subjects putting on American dialects (Hugh Laurie, Damian Lewis, Christian Bale).

"The Three Caballeros" is one of the most unusual of oddities in the Disney animated canon. It's arguably the package feature which requires to be seen altogether the most (that is not to say that these such films deserve to go cut up and remain only viewed as separate short subjects and featurettes; it's just that they could and have easily been viewed as separate things). Regardless, it still doesn't have much of a plot. Donald Duck receives a whole load of birthday presents from his friends in Latin America, the first of which he opens being a film reel exhibiting short subjects concerning Latin American themes and stories. However, the film soon deviates as Donald's eccentric friends Jose Carioca (a parrot from Brazil) and Panchito (a rooster from Mexico) arrive and via the use of some magic gifts transport Donald to their respective countries, where live-action actors and animated settings and beings interact. In my opinion, the second and third acts of the film (the first act being the assorted short films) cannot really be viewed out of context, so in some ways, the film walks the line between single story feature (such as "Snow White", "Pinocchio", "Dumbo" etc) and package feature.For those who don't know much about the context in which the film was made (I suspect that most people who are visiting this page, however, are animation buffs who will know a bit about this film), "The Three Caballeros" was, like the earlier "Saludos Amigos" (a similarly unusual entry in Disney's library of animated features), a by-product of the American government pressuring Disney to create films based around Latin American themes in order for the USA to woo neutral South America during the Second World War away from anything Axis, and respectively also make Yankees appreciate all things South of the Border. There are hints to the propaganda purposes (such as the general "OMG, aren't Mexico and Brazil so cool?" tone as well as the birds of South America being dubbed "Donald's cousins"), but overall, the film doesn't seem too dated, or as much as everyone says it has."The Three Caballeros" is actually rather surreal. I honestly believe that such a far-out film would never get made today by such a prominent studio. It's the trippiest of Disney's animated classics easily. "Alice in Wonderland", as everybody jokes, is a bit of an LSD-fest in places, but its storybook roots keep it from seeming like the result of drinking something from a bottle marked "DRINK ME". And the high-brow spirit of "Fantasia" and its Rackham-esquire look has always prevented me from labelling it as truly trippy. Much of "The Three Caballeros", however, is so crazy that I wondered if I'd taken something by accident. The main background throughout the film is vague, changing colour to suit the mood of the scene, and the animation has no limits most of the time (for example, inanimate objects and things come to life like random, the laws of physics are disobeyed very much so and characters morph and multiply at the drop of a hat). There's even some early experiments with mixing animation and live action thrown in. Some of it is kinda lame - Aurora Miranda, playing a Brazilian cake seller, looks like she's simply walking in front of a screen where footage of Donald Duck is playing - however, some effects are quite good, such as animated cockerels morphing into live men.Overall, "The Three Caballeros" is a good film. Admittedly, the first act doesn't match the second and third act very well (it actually seems like left-overs from the tamer sister-film "Saludos Amigos", and some of the surrealism gets a bit too baffling to watch (the final ten minutes or so is an example of this sort). And not knowing any Portuguese, Jose Carioca can be difficult to understand, as he often spurts out the odd word or phrase in his native language. Yet the film is most certainly still worth watching, and makes for quite an underrated piece. Also recommended is "Blame it on the Samba" from 1948's "Melody Time". Whilst generally quite a dull package film, that segment is excellent. I believe that it was planned for "The Three Caballeros", though didn't surface until a few years later.