Disney Review: The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music, Fun and Fancy Free

I'm blogging through all the feature films released theatrically by Walt Disney Animation Studios! For more information on the project, you can visit my introductory post here. You can see an overview of all the posts in the series here.

Package films... fun times.

Movies I'm watching for the first time (i.e. all of them this time) are marked with an asterisk.

To see the previous post in this series, go here.

UPDATE: To see the next post in this series, go here.

7. *The Three Caballeros (1944)

In most cases, a studio saying, "Hey, what if we make a sequel to our moderately entertaining, culturally pandering anthology film?" would be a red flag. To that end, I wasn't expecting much of The Three Caballeros, which is, in some obvious ways, a sequel to Saludos Amigos, importing the premise (making a "package" movie about Latin American ostensibly for Latin American audiences) and some of the characters (Donald Duck and his Cuban friend, José Carioca). And The Three Caballeros has some of the same problems that dog Saludos Amigos, especially the condescending "look at how cute this foreign culture is!" tone.

But I say it's a sequel in "some" ways because in others, Saludos Amigos does nothing at all to prepare audiences for the cavalcade of utter strangeness and raging formal experimentation that is The Three Caballeros. The movie begins with a pair of self-contained shorts—"The Cold-Blooded Penguin," about an Antarctic penguin who wants to move to a warmer environment, and "The Flying Gauchito," about a boy with a flying donkey—that are odd in how intrusive their narrators are but otherwise fit reasonably well within the tradition of 1940s Disney whimsy. But then José Carioca shows up, and all hell breaks loose as the film proceeds to tear itself apart, piece by piece. I mean this almost literally; beginning with "Baía," a short introduced by José about the Brazilian state of Bahia (Disney apparently doesn't know how to spell the name of the region it wants to portray?), each successive segment of the movie breaks down more and more the barriers between animation and live action, first as Donald Duck and José Carioca jump through a movie projector into a live-action samba that stars Brazilian actor and singer Aurora Miranda, then later as the pair's adventures escalate into a series of mixed-media adventures involving Donald and José (plus a new tagalong, Panchito Pistoles—i.e. the third "caballero") riding a flying sarape through an alternatingly animated and live-action landscape, and finally as Donald Duck begins to hallucinate and the whole movie devolves into a blender of disembodied live-action heads, kaleidoscope swirls, and animated pieces of incongruous Latin American imagery.

If this all sounds completely unhinged, it is, and I haven't even described the half of it and won't; this is truly one of those situations where words can't do justice to what the film sets in motion. It's by far the most aggressively weird thing Disney ever did in one of their features (unless Dinosaur is going to surprise me in a few weeks), and not just that: it's one of the weirdest things I've seen in any animated cinema—feature or short—from this era. In fact, the easiest comparison that comes to mind when describing the movie's hallucinatory climax is Hausu, that monument of horror incomprehensibility—only The Three Caballeros is much more playful than it is horrific.

It bears mentioning that the movie is fairly regressive in its sexual politics; Donald Duck's thing the whole movie is basically to be an unrepentant horndog and chase every woman he sees, because Latina women are sexy, amirite fellas?, which is pretty gross conceptually; that said, the movie is so surreal and formally off-the-wall that it makes the sexism feel sort of distant and abstract, as if Donald Duck is tripping peyote more than he is actually lusting. Nevertheless, there's my caveat. Otherwise, this is my first big surprise in this Disney project, a movie that I expected almost nothing from but that actually delivered something bonkers and otherworldly. It's definitely the most interesting Disney feature since Bambi, and I'm tempted to call it the best movie Disney had made since Fantasia. Even if it isn't, it's still one wild ride.

8. *Make Mine Music (1946)

So as I'm sure you've seen, the first two package films are unified both internally and with each other by a friendliness toward Latin America. In this sense, they at least have a certain logic and consistency to them that, even if it doesn't always produce top-notch work, at least makes sense. But what do you do once your cultural tourism material runs out and you're still reeling from the financial and personnel costs of WWII? Disney's answer to that was to slap together this package of shorts, where the unifying premise is... music, I guess? It's not a bad premise, necessarily; Fantasia made hay (if not money) out of it. But bless its heart, Make Mine Music is not Fantasia. It is, rather, the laziest and most slap-dash feature of this era of Disney.

Credit where credit is due: the "Peter and the Wolf" segment is fantastic, utilizing Sergei Prokofiev's then-recent orchestral piece of the same name (except in Russian) to create a wonderfully animated fairy tale in miniature. I have fond memories of renting this short (which I guess Disney packaged individually?) from the local Hollywood Video as a kid, and those memories have not betrayed me. It's great, and it's no coincidence that when Fantasia was re-released in 1946, Disney included this short along with it. The rest of the movie, though, that's a different story. "Blue Bayou" imagines what the stultifying pacing of Bambi would be like if it had no cute animals and instead was set to a really boring mid-century pop ballad; "Casey at the Bat" takes that annoying poem you had to read in elementary school and sets it to clearly Looney-Tunes-inspired caricature (as it turns out, Disney animators are still far too reverent to make this work); "Two Silhouettes" features, you guessed it, two silhouettes (definitely rotoscoped, or at least animated through some similar effect) dancing to another boring mid-century pop ballad; "The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met" is about what it says on the can, and while the whale itself is charmingly animated (probably the best non-"Peter and the Wolf" character in the film), the plotting is turgid and the tone cloying.

There are a few other shorts in the package, but honestly, none of them deserve much commentary, and I'm already tired of talking about this movie. A real low-point of this project so far.

9. *Fun and Fancy Free (1947)

Unlike the other package films, Fun and Fancy Free is not a group of a half dozen or so shorts; it is instead just a pair of lengthy shorts (each over thirty minutes in length, so one has to question the efficacy of calling something that approaches the runtime of Saludos Amigos a "short"), surrounded by an odd framing device involving a poorly animated Jiminy Cricket putting on an LP record and visiting a live-action ventriloquist (the integration of live action and animation pays off in exactly one instance—a very cool effect in which Jiminy drinks a live-action soda). The less said about that framing device the better; ventriloquism is weird on any day, and it's even weirder when it's intruding on what is supposed to be an animated film.

Let's talk instead about the actual pair of "shorts." Good news first: the second short here is "Mickey and the Beanstalk," one of the unqualified classics of the era and a short that, if you spent any time around Disney merchandise as a child, you probably ran into. For those who didn't, the lowdown is that it's basically "Jack and the Beanstalk," retold as a caper starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy (the short's title gives way short shrift to Donald and Goofy, who are most definitely co-stars alongside Mickey). There's nothing especially groundbreaking about the film, but it's incredibly fun and focuses (to great effect) on that guileless, bouncy slapstick that animates the best Disney shorts of the era. It's delightful, sullied only by the way that the ventriloquist framing device keeps interrupting the story to let the dummies comment on the action (presaging MST3K, but in a bad way).

But alas, "Mickey and the Beanstalk" is only the back half of the feature. The first, "Bongo," is the story of a bear who escapes his unhappy captivity in the circus (say what you will about Disney's politics, but the studio was at least privy to the rampant ring of sanctioned animal abuse that is the circus) to go live in the forest, where he finds love and friendship and a whole bunch of other Disney baloney. And... I'm sorry, it's terrible. There's nothing redeemable about this movie. The character animation is bad, this unfortunately murky cartoonishness that's at once unrealistic in this very rubbery and distancing way and also incurably dull and anonymous. The story is unstructured, a feature which makes this already lengthy short feel even lengthier, and the film has a habit of feeling like it is wrapping up before lurching into another story beat. The songs are bad; I won't blame Dinah Shore, who is forced to sing some gratingly anonymous tunes here, but her very 1940s-style trill doesn't help. And that's to say nothing of "Say It with a Slap," a song that posits that wild bears love each other by slapping one another in the face—my wife thought this seemed to be advocating for domestic violence, and while I won't deny the implications, I'm not sure the film has thought through the subtext of this song so thoroughly; it leans so heavily into the supposed silliness of this concept that I have to assume that some storyboarder at Disney thought it would be funny to animate bears slapping one another and then ran with it. Either way, though, it's bad.

At the very beginning of Fun and Fancy Free, Jiminy Cricket tells us, the audience, of the benefits of optimism. "Just look at the morning paper," he says. "Turn to any page; you'll find the whole world worrying about some future age." In true Disney tradition, he tells us to put aside our worries and just have fun. Well, Jiminy, it'd be a lot easier to have fun if your movie wasn't so inconsistent. It's not the future age I'm worrying about—the future brings Alice in Wonderland and Sleeping Beauty and a whole host of good Disney features; no, it's this package-film present that's getting me down. These are dark times.