Growing up, I would go with my uncle to his best friend's parent's house for dinner every once in a while. Looking back, I am not entirely sure why I was invited but I remember three things from these dinners. 1. They had one of those vintage Mickey phones and I wished my family had one. 2. This is where I learned that some people like to put fresh pepper on their salads and that that was okay. 3. They would send me home with an 8 hour VHS filled with Disney cartoons and movies.
This is where my like for Disney all began. With my collection of homemade VHS cassettes each with the titles stacked vertically in perfectly printed ink. I have the most vivid memories of watching Robin Hood and The Brave Little Toaster from these tapes. I also remember that at the end of one of these tapes was The Three Caballeros. I could never get through it because it wasn't entirely animated and I usually just asked my dad to fast forward back to Robin Hood.
So when I set out on this journey, I was excited to revisit The Three Caballeros. The history of both Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros is fascinating involving Nazis and federal loan guarantees and resetting the American idea of what Latin America was like.
My BFF Amanda and I planned to make an evening out of these two movies. We made amazing Chorizo nachos and prepared to feel uncomfortable about cultural stereotypes being putting forward by an American company. We were pleasantly surprised with beautiful animation based primarily on the landscape of Latin America.
Saludos Amigos contains four different cartoons each set in a different South American country. Each cartoon represents an idea element of national identity (Argentina's Gaucho, Chile's Aconcaqua, Peru and Bolivia's Lake Titicaca, Brazil's Samba) and paints beautiful and digestible story about it. In order evoke humor, Disney incorporates Goofy and Donald to be the stand in American tourist who we laugh at as he bumbles about South America.
The Three Caballeros returns us to Latin America taking us from Argentina back to Brazil and finally spends most of its time in Mexico. The Three Caballeros is a similar format but falls short of Saludos Amigos "here is a great thing about this country" format. The Three Caballeros starts with two cartoons about Argentina one about a penguin who makes a boat of a frozen ice and sails to Ecuador. The second is about a little Gauchito who discovers a winged burro and his adventures to protect him. The most stunning part of the film is a section about Brazil's Baía. The animation of a city and sunset is nostalgia invoking for a time of simpler animation. The movie wraps with a frantic introduction to Panchito, a rooster from Mexico, who takes us on a fast paced journey through Mexico including beautiful women and dancing cactus and pinata that comes to life.
Overall, both movies are soft, fun and beautiful. They hit their mark of portraying what would have been a foreign land to a new audience and helping shape their assumptions about a different country.
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