Melody Time (1948) & The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)

 Well, at least I beat my previous turnaround time for this post. I am ecstatic to finally be done with these package films and be returning to the traditional storytelling of disney films. Before we can finally leave them behind we have what is in my opinion the best package films since Saludos Amigos. 

To continue in order we’ll begin with 1948’s Melody Time. While not as ambitious as Fantasia’s musical segments, nor as artistically/historically interesting as Saludos Amigos these shorts largely were able to be funny, poignant, and artistically interesting enough to hold my attention throughout.

“Once Upon a Wintertime” starts us off with a beautiful sleigh ride around a river, then an ice skating trip gone wrong as our protagonist couple hit some interpersonal friction on the ice which leads to danger as the woman storms off onto thin ice which breaks apart and sweeps her towards a waterfall. Her man fails to save her and is knocked into a snowbank but she is saved by a concerted effort from the animals that have been flitting about them all day. This is a bit of a nothing opening, the visuals are pretty and the stylism on display is lovely, but the actual action is delivered without dialogue. This leads to the conflict being a touch toothless as it appears to be kickstarted by the man just deciding to be annoying after a while of very romantic interactions. Out of nowhere he takes a massive run up and hockey stops to spray his beau with ice shards. While we obviously know too little about any of their characters to say anything is in or out of character it certainly felt unmotivated by his previous behaviour and somewhat took me out of the rest of the short. The music was passable but completely not to my taste and didn’t feel like it was adding much to me.

“Bumble Boogie” is a fantastic piece of music. It’s a jazzy rendition of the “Flight of the Bumblebees” and the visuals bring to mind the best parts of psychedelia Fantasia had to offer. A bumblebee gets assaulted by various shape shifting things with similarities to musical instruments in time to the music. It’s hard to describe without going beat for beat and I feel like reading that description would take longer than the three minute piece itself, and still be woefully inferior. This piece is another in the list of things that make me wish we got a Jazz Fantasia and is well worth finding on YouTube if you’re so inclined. There’s not much depth to this that I could ascertain beyond simple enjoyment, so there’s not much else I can say here. Well worth the three minutes.

“The Legend of Johnny Appleseed” is some serious Westward Expansion apologia and as such is somewhat difficult to watch in modern times, doubly so as a non-American. A “pioneer” narrator tells us the story of John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, a godly apple farmer who was sent west (young man) by a personal guardian angel with a tin pot, a bible, and a bag of appleseeds. He befriends the wild beasts and plants apple trees all over America to be enjoyed by pioneers and Indians alike. At the end of his life he is only lured into heaven with the promise that they need some apple trees and the pioneer narrator tells us that what we see in the sky aren’t clouds, but “They’re apple blossoms from Johnny’s heavenly orchard of apple trees”. This short has decent songs and is well animated. It’s even somewhat endearing, but all that competency going towards some pretty overt Manifest Destiny propaganda is hard to stomach, and it gave me a sourer taste while watching it than Johnny’s apples must have. You’ll note that he plants those orchards from seeds which, from everything I know, is a terrible way to get apples that taste halfway decent. If you can divorce yourself from the propaganda aspects this is probably a fairly decent short, but this reviewer was not capable of doing so in this case.

“Little Toot” is the story of an irresponsible tugboat who is exiled after an attempt to help a ship makes it crash into the city. He finds a ship that’s been swept onto the rocks in a storm and brings it back home to great acclaim. It’s neither the worst nor the best of this genre of morality story, but it is commendable for a great atmosphere. The storm seems terrifying, the police boats menacing, and the ocean liners gigantic. Fairly mid, but entertainingly so.

“Trees” is an adaptation of the 1915 Joyce Kilmer poem of the same name, and using the 1922 musical composition by Oscar Rasbach for the same verse. In a framing reminiscent again of Fantasia the narrator tells us “Now we bring to you these three: Poem, picture, melody. A simple tribute to a tree” and it is clear that the Disney animators were interested in exploring what they could add to a work of art that had already been adapted from written to audio media. What they can add, as it turns out, is some of the best animation I’ve seen in this era of Disney films. While still cartoony, the style of the animals is far more detailed and because of this adds a level of realism, or at least verisimilitude, that many of the package film shorts lack. The different angles and scenes of the tree all look like different trees until we return to a shot of the tree at the angle we were introduced to it and can see the complexities that were missed on the first glimpse. This has the effect of making it seem like the one tree touches different worlds and the link to divinity at the end of the poem feels earned once we’ve seen this tree touch so many elements of life. This isn’t the most engaging short, but it is clear that there is a lot of effort being put into it and it is intriguing to think about.

The penultimate short is “Blame it on the Samba” and stars Donald Duck and José Carioca who mope into frame coloured in blue with their heads hung. They find their way into a bar whose proprietor is the Aracuan Bird from The Three Caballeros. The Bird makes them drinks and puts different samba instruments into the cocktail shaker, and as it does this our protagonists have colour returned to them, both literally and figuratively. A short amount of dancing later we transition to inside one of the samba drinks where we see a live action plate of a woman playing an organ and the animated characters interact with her in a few different scenes. None of them are particularly interesting and I find the drop in energy noticeable and frustrating everytime the live action plate is intruding on the short; however, the best shot in the short is when the Bird blows up the live action organ and an animated one reforms around the player. Overall this short is alright, but personally I found it a touch bland. Carioca is a welcome returning character, but the Aracuan Bird was pretty mid in its first appearance and continues to feel like a bland version of the Road Runner in this incarnation as well.

“Pecos Bill” is the final short and what a bizarrely apt note to end this run of package films on. The short opens on gorgeous animation of a desert at night. The moon is shining on the cacti and the pillars of stone provide perches for birds and coyotes alike. A soft chorus of voices croons that “until darkness sheds its veil, there’ll be blue shadows on the trail” in a barbershop quartet ode to the still melancholy of the night. This beautiful scene sadly transitions into a live action plate of western pioneers, or a caravan of cowboys and the like - the time period seems deliberately vague - trekking through Texas.Some mild antics lead into a child asking who Pecos Bill is and the adults begin the story. We’re told a fairly simple Texan creation myth about how Bill dropped out of the back of a wagon as was raised by a Coyote family. He did each animal’s thing better than it could (jump higher, chew through bones, run faster etc), and eventually saves a foal from vultures. They go on to be such a wildly successful pair that he’s responsible for the gold in the texan hills (he rustles some bandits and shakes loose their fillings), the water in the Gulf of Mexico (he brought the rain from California), and the Rio Grande exists (he was thirsty and… dug it?) among a few less savoury creations (to do with depictions of Native Americans I don’t care to describe here). He finally meets a woman, Sue, who can match him in many tasks, and they are wed. For the wedding she requires a bustle, a dress, and to be allowed to ride Bill’s horse Widowmaker. She manages to ride the horse for some time, but is eventually bucked off and bounces ever higher on the bustle. Bill attempts to lasso her but is unknowingly sabotaged by Widowmaker and falls short. Sue bounces to the moon and we’re told that the coyotes howl at the moon in sympathy with Bill who was reduced to the same whenever he saw the object his love landed on. This short is a reasonably cute adaptation of the standard style of explanatory creation myth (“rainbows are God’s promise”, “Winter is because Demeter is sad about Persephone going to Hades”) with some cute Americana added in. Apart from the horrible depiction of Indians, which is mercifully brief, the short is filled with comedic bits and overall aims for a frenetic pace to match the pure undiluted madness of its main character. Unfortunately, the quartet style of singing, which in the opening lent a gorgeous sense of atmosphere and contemplation, is simply too slow and often stilted to match the energy of the plot, characters, and animation. Multiple times the animation is going for an obvious joke but has to extend the lead up by a beat or two too many in order to allow the slowly narrated lyrics to catch up with the joke. Because these instances are rarely expectation subverting, they simply leave the viewer with a sense of impatience and ruin the flow of an otherwise serviceable short. 

In many ways “Pecos Bill” sums up not just the feeling that I left Melody Time with, but the entire run of package films since Saludos Amigos. Where the first felt like it had a theme and artistic exploration, the shorts since then have been largely or completely disconnected from each other and ranging wildly in not just entertainment quality but occasionally animation quality. Disney’s experiments with mixing live action with animation were surely impressive for the time, but to a modern viewer the seams of animation techniques are obvious as the energy leaves the animation to accommodate the shots, and often the mix itself causes problems as the shorts variously attempt to justify the blend narratively or abandon any sense of explanation. The most successful shorts are the ones that felt like they belonged in the pre-package era’s anthology film, Fantasia, with some of the highlights being what I’ve lovingly begun to think of as Fantasia, but JAZZ. in Melody Time  “Bumble Boogie” was the breath of fresh air, but Make Mine Music had “All the Cats Join In” and “After You’ve Gone” keeping the energy for that film. Despite the best attempts of the Fantasia, but JAZZ segments, the shorts in these package films were on average, inoffensively boring, and for an entertainment product this feels like the most damning critique. Ultimately the package films made me not want to keep watching and this project has advanced so slowly because of this lack of interest. The excitement I feel to be moving onto a transition back to feature films is immeasurable, so let us move onto the “last” package film, but also the transition back to normalcy that is The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.

Despite the ordering of the name we actually begin with the adaptation that genuinely makes me want to read The Wind in the Willows, “The Adventure of Mr. Toad”. We open in a large library while a narrator asks us who the “most fabulous character in English literature” is. A few answers are postulated but the narrator tells us that in his opinion it’s Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows. We begin with a pan down a river while the setting (English countryside) is explained and that Mr. Toad has a number of fairweather friends, but among them there are three true friends. The camera goes inside of a house perched on the river to see Mr. Rat awaiting Mr. Mole’s arrival for tea. After his arrival the postman delivers a letter summoning them to Toad Manor where the long-suffering Mr. MacBadger has been attempting to rescue Toad from his financial irresponsibility. We learn that Toad has taken to wandering the countryside in a yellow “gypsy wagon” with his horse (and enabler) Cyril. We see the duo tear their way through a scene “on the way to nowhere” before Toad sees a motorcar and is entranced, mimicking it all the way back to Toad manor in a display of impressive vocal talent (the sputtering of an early car coming out of a toad’s body was highly amusing) and apparent yet unremarked upon levitation. We see the three friends attempt to restrain Toad from his financially ruinous new mania by keeping watch on his room, but unbeknownst to them he escapes through the window and is arrested for stealing a car to take on a joyride. We join the narrative again in the courtroom where the prosecution is asking leading questions to Toad’s friends and not letting them answer. Mr. Toad rises in his own defense - yes, the barrister's wig on the toad body is adorable - and calls on the horse Cyril as his defense witness. Cyril recounts that Toad and he had absconded from the manor and found a beautiful red motor car sitting outside a pub filled with weasels. Mr. Toad negotiates with the weasels for the car, signing them the deed to Toad Manor in exchange for the car. The deal is witnessed, in an official sense, by the disreputable looking bartender Mr. Winky, who in the present is called as the defence’s star witness. True to his untrustworthy face, Mr. Winky takes the stand and corroborates the prosecution’s narrative, not Cyril’s. We’re shown a flash of Toad’s friends appealing the case, but cut to Toad alone in the Tower of London around Christmas. His “grandma” (read: Cyril in disguise) comes to visit him, and helps him escape, also in the disguise of an old lady. He makes his way to Mr. Rat’s house, who is apparently hosting Mr. Mole alone for Christmas. MacBadger also comes around and informs us that there were lights on in Toad Manor. When Toad arrives they all decide to go through a secret entrance to retrieve the physical deed from the weasels and Mr Winky. They do so in a large fight scene and the end of the story shows us Toad Manor restored, and Mr. Toad unrepentant taking up piloting as his new mania.

The adaptation of the Wind in the WIllows itself is not something I’ll be able to discuss here, as I’ve actually never read that novel; however,I have been made much more interested in doing so by this film. What I can discuss is how beautiful it was to finally have longer form storytelling. This story had multiple moving pieces and allowed for some slower moments that built to a large climax. The animation itself was simply gorgeous, the English countryside was stunningly portrayed, with a good deal of detail, and all the animals in their human clothes were a brilliant balance of dapper and cute. The weasels move lithely and are all in typical gangster caps, we even see them patrolling Toad Manor with muskets and bayonets. Mr. Mole’s hat that eventually gets sliced up. Mr Rat’s glorious mustache, deer-hunter hat, and corduroy coat looked wonderful and perfectly capture his attempt to be serious and demure - but also his struggle to be that in the face of Toad’s antics. MacBadger’s controlled or suppressed anger is a treat every moment he’s on screen. And Mr. Toad’s dapper, gentlemanly misbehaviour is soft spoken in the best ways. Truly all these characters wonderfully relate the tale of the “most fabulous character in English Literature”.

We fade out from watching Mr. Toad lazily circle Toad Manor in his new obsession of an aircraft, and return to the library where Bing Crosby takes over narration for “The Story of Ichabod Crane”. As the “camera” moves through The Legend of Sleepy Hollow book, we see the village of Tarrytown on the Hudson, and go inland to a “quiet, peaceful, and somewhat foreboding” secluded glen of Sleepy Hollow. We follow a newcomer to the town, Ichabod Crane, as he bounces into town with his nose buried in a book. Immediately we see that the animation of this film has a smooth physicality to it, similar to rotoscoped animation, but maintaining the cartoony physics common to Disney’s more slapstick shorts. We hear about the ways that Ichabod integrates himself into town as the schoolmaster -  finding the mothers who cook well and teaching the young women how to sing - and we hear that he has become “the town’s ladies man” who “gets around like nobody can”. After living some time as what I have to assume is Disney’s family friendly way of describing a lothario, Ichabod meets the daughter of a local wealthy landowner, Katrina, and falls in love with her (or at least her connections to money). The local proto-Gaston - Brom Bone - and his gang of “country bumpkins” are also enamoured of Katrina (or her father’s wealth), and “every portal to Katrina’s heart was jealously guarded” by them; nonetheless, “Ichabod was was confident he’d soon run roughshod” over them all. Ichabod’s confidence appears to not be ill-placed as we’re shown that Katrina wishes for someone to challenge Brom openly, and as soon as Ichabod does she starts to favour the schoolmaster. A variety of antics ensue, with Ichabod moving smoothly through Brom’s more direct approaches and managing to be the Bugs Bunny to his Yosemite Sam. This all changes one Halloween, as Brom is invited to tell a ghost story around the fireplace, and tells the story of the Headless Horseman, and Ichabod is revealed to be particularly superstitious and fearful of what goes bump in the night. Later that evening, as Ichabod is riding home, we see him perceiving the creeping woods as more menacing than we’d seen during the day, and as a taloned gauntlet of clouds cover the moon, he enters a tunnel of closely arching bare branches, promptly losing what little cool he had remaining. His spooked horse bolts and he falls into a graveyard and is knocked unconscious. Coming too Ichabod realises that he was overly scared of natural occurrences, until the Headless Horseman rides into frame. Impressively animated in dark purple and red shades, with jet black shadows and a steed composed of darkness, the Horseman manages to look both out of place, and like the culmination of the art style of this short. An exemplary chase sequence then ensues, with Ichabod almost making it across the bridge that Brom’s story from earlier in the evening marked as safety, but he is not quite able to make it and may have been taken by the Horseman. The narrator tells us that Katrina married Brom, and that Ichabod was never seen in Sleepy Hollow again, but it’s left ambiguous if that’s due to him leaving or being taken by the Headless Horseman as “The next morning Ichabod’s hat was found, and close beside it a shattered pumpkin, but there was no trace of the schoolmaster”. As the camera leaves the story world, and returns to the library, the lights all turn off, and we hear the narrator say “man, I’m getting outta here”, in a fittingly spooky ending to the spookiest story I’ve seen from Disney.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a touch weaker than The Wind in the Willows for a Disney adaptation, and I get the sense that the animators likely took some liberties when it came to the hijinks surrounding the courtship of Katrina. It also leads to the film ending on an incredibly strong eerie atmosphere, but the middle of the story has an almost opposite aesthetic. Ichabod’s vulnerability to superstition is something that could quite easily have been worked into the narrative prior to it becoming relevant, and it leads to the film not feeling like a coherent narrative, so much as a series of plot points. Where The Wind in the WIllows provided numerous antics for the animators to adapt, those antics also felt linked to each other through the character of Mr. Toad and his manias, in a way that Ichabod Crane’s adventures weren’t able to replicate. While the storyline of a womaniser pursuing a local rich daughter partially for her beauty and partially for her wealth isn’t inherently problematic, the lack of embellishment in any narrative way makes it feel like the plot is happening to, rather than being driven by the characters. The cartoony elements also feel more out of place in this narrative, especially once the supernatural elements have been introduced, in a way that makes them stand out rather than offsetting each other. In “The Adventures of Mr. Toad” the serious character/legal drama contrasted with the zany manias of Toad, and the cartoony weasel scenes, but in Sleepy Hollow the cartoony elements do not enhance the eerie, but detract from the moods that attempt to be established.

Overall this film is a clear and vast improvement on the previous package films, and I welcome any return to longer form storytelling, even if the production hell these two films went through is fairly obvious from the final products. I have found forcing myself through these 6 package films rather difficult, as indicated by the enormous gaps in between posts (mea culpa), but this last package has reignited my joy in this project and has me excited for the next one. Next time, (I’ve learned not to commit to a timeline here), we will be discussing the first of the next batch of feature length films, Cinderella.

Make Mine Music (1946) & Fun and Fancy Free (1947)

 Wow, the last post was delayed by 3 days and I opened with an apology and explanation, I’m not quite sure what I can offer for the 6 month gap. Though we are returning with a slight whimper (as will become apparent) I must nonetheless thank Ian for keeping me honest and reminding me to continue. Please continue to use shame to keep me going!

To begin with perhaps the most interesting thing about either of these package films is that Disney seems deeply ashamed of the first and third short in Make Mine Music, and yes that is a subtle hint about how dull these two films are. The first short is “The Martins and the Coys” which is a fairly by-the-book story about two warring families who kill each other over a small offense and are survived by a woman and a man who fall in love. They then proceed to get into arguments in their marital home, much to the satisfaction of the ghosts of their relatives. According to both Wikipedia and the Disney wiki this short was removed from most releases of the film for featuring gun violence. It’s so cartoony that I don’t understand why this would be enough, but it is undeniable that there is a lot of shooting and dying. All in all it was inoffensive, I’d just recommend watching a good production of Romeo and Juliet or, for an animated film, Netflix’s Klaus to see versions of this story that are able to take the drama (and comedy) to a better place.

The next short is “Blue Bayou”. As I did once for “Mickey Mouse on Ice” I’m just going to put my notes unedited here:

• I miss Fantasia

• The lyrics are such nonsense that I’ve had to look them up because I assumed I’d missed something, AND LOOK UP BAYOU because I assumed it had a meaning other than what I knew: it doesn’t…

• So… that was just a Blue Bayou at night and then some storks or something (the wiki informs me they’re Egrets) met up and flew off? That was the whole short? 

Hope that peek behind the
curtain is entertaining and shows how deeply boring this short was.

Following that snooze-fest is “All the Cats Join In”, the second short to be censored, although in this case it was only one shot that was redrawn. This was actually quite entertaining and is set to some upbeat jazz music. The plot itself is fairly simple, a boy drives to pick up friends and take them to a dance party at what appears to be a milkbar. Incidentally it is in a scene where we see one of the girls getting ready that we see the back of the side of a breast for a brief moment. Apparently this was so scandalous that it was redrawn for home release around the 2000s. The conceit of this short is that there is a pencil appearing and drawing in elements and interacting with the characters the whole way through. It draws the front of the boys car which then races off away from it, so it creates a traffic light and used the stop to draw the back of the car. The gags are mostly funny intentionally and it adds a real energy to the piece that was surprisingly infectious. There were a few jokes that were slightly cringy in 2025, but none that are bad enough to describe. Overall a good short.

“Without You” is so close to being as good as the best of Fantasia with its abstract imagery and sceneries smoothly transitioning into each other. If only it wasn’t a song with (English) lyrics and the animation was weirdly literal to those lyrics. On top of this, the imagery is so successful at conveying the loneliness the lyrics are singing about, that the presence of a vocalist actually makes it feel less lonely. A strange thematic own goal that I’m not confident anyone else will agree with. Ah well. It still takes the dubious crown of being the third best short in Make Mine Music.

“Casey at the Bat” starts so strongly with gorgeous oil painting still shots establishing the scene of a baseball game. We fade into a more traditionally animated story of an overconfident batsman who strikes out instead of saving his team. The two best jokes in this were the pitcher and catcher’s fingers contorting themselves to communicate, and the ball dancing on its own to avoid Casey’s bat at the end. Otherwise a pretty middling quality short with an extremely interesting start.

“Two Silhouettes” has a male and female ballet dancer performing a relatively simple duet, with abstract animation setting the scene around them. The catch is that the “two silhouettes” are matted out live action footage superimposed on the animation. The effect is a touch entrancing and the highest praise I can give it is that were it in Fantasia I’d think it was inoffensively mid-range. Here it remains middle of the pack, but solidly in the upper half.

“Peter and the Wolf” is another that is impossible not to compare unfavourably to Fantasia, and again it’s not the animation holding it back. As in the original composition by Prokofiev each character is represented by a different instrument and there is a narrator, but here the animation is already serving the purpose of narration. The narration in the end only serves to make the piece weaker as the delivery by Sterling Holloway and the writing just can’t compete with the power of the music combined with the animation. I feel like this is a lesson that Disney should have learned in Fantasia but perhaps the Peter and the Wolf story was too recent or the commercial failure of that film made Disney skittish to not have a narrator. Whatever the reason the simple story is made worse by over explanation.

Continuing the theme of comparison to Fantasia is “After You’ve Gone”, a lyricless jazz quartet has the instruments parade around to the music in an abstract and smoothly animated piece that is on the level of the “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” from Fantasia. A stunning piece that almost made watching this film worth it.

Beginning the downward slide to the end of the package is “Johnnie Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet”, the story of a fedora and a bluebonnet that fall in love in the window of their store, are bought by separate owners, then finally find themselves reunited on the top of two horses. If it were 60 seconds it might be a touching short, but it drags on for far too long.

Finally “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met” is so dull that I barely took any notes. The whale is able to sing in three voices and once and uses that to fantasise about performing in the Met. In this fantasy the whale is able to stand on its fins and takes up the entire stage. This short is bizarre and honestly not that engaging. Anytime an animated short has me thinking about the realities of physics it has probably failed in the task of being entertaining and creative already. Unfortunately, while this package does have several truly great shorts, without the linking narrative of Saludos Amigos or the high concept of Fantasia it really fails to find a way to tie them together and makes for a viewing experience that is significantly less than the sum of its parts. I would not recommend doing the digging it takes to find a way to view the uncensored versions of this, or to view it at all.

Thankfully Fun and Fancy Free only has two segments, unfortunately it is not able to make either of them shine. The framing device of this film is Jiminy Cricket, seemingly just drifting around, coming across a dour doll and a “droopy bear” and deciding to play a record with the story of the circus bear “Bongo” on it. The story begins with showing how Bongo is a skilled and beloved acrobatic bear in the circus, but as soon as he leaves the stage he is chained and treated roughly (note: not cruelly, just cleaned by others and bailed up into a bed). He longs to be free and to roam
the wild, and eventually is desperate enough to escape. He wanders through the woods and eventually lackadaisically strolls with a coterie of woodland creatures accompanying him. When night falls he is disturbed by bugs and wind, then frightened off by rain and wolves. He realises that the woods aren’t as easy to survive as expected when he struggles to catch a fish to eat the next morning. He finds and falls in love with a lady bear, but insults her when he fails to realise that

bears show love through slapping their partner. This is eventually resolved, but not after a fight with a giant bear that takes a little too long, and the narrative resolves. There is a message hidden in there somewhere about the importance of communication and the difficulty of cross-cultural relationships, but that's hidden underneath the fact that the obstacle is that our protagonist WON’T SLAP HIS LOVE. Truly a bizarre ending to a dull story.

After this Jiminy Cricket sees an invitation to a party across the road and secretly gatecrashes Edgar Bergen, who I assume was a celebrity ventriloquist at the time of release, entertaining a girl with his puppets. Bergen begins to tell a version of the Jack and the Beanstalk story starring Goofy, Donald, and Mickey. In this the valley was prosperous due to a harp but is sent into famine when a “shadow” steals it. In desperation Mickey trades their cow for “magic beans” which carry them and their house into the clouds. The find the giant’s castle and the magic harp and have to outwit the giant. Eventually they bring it back and the giant falls to its seeming death. One of the puppets is upset about the death of the giant and they console him that the giant never existed outside of his imagination. Then the giant lifts the roof off the live action house and asks if any of them have seen Mickey before proceeding to search through Hollywood. This summary leaves out the constant annoying interjections from the puppets and low energy songs.

Overall both these films were a slog to watch, despite some highs. I was having to note the few times I even smirked at the jokes as they were so poor, and the pacing was abysmal, especially in Fun and Fancy Free. It is obvious that many of the shorts were either left over from Fantasia or were ideas that didn’t have enough for a feature treatment. In both cases a lack of overarching connectivity also harmed the ability for the movies to say something overall. I am hopeful that the final two package films will be more interesting, at least in the animation, but what these made me long for was a return to traditional storytelling.

One more post before we are able to jump into Disney’s golden age.

Saludos Amigos (1943) & The Three Caballeros (1945)

 Firstly, to those reading on release I must apologise for the delayed release of this post, it is partially due to covering two films, and partially as I’ve done some reading on these films as I hope will be apparent.

In 1940 Nelson Rockefeller, grandson to the famous John D. Rockefeller and future Vice President of the United States, was appointed as the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) by FDR to rebuff the Nazi influence in Latin America (Adams 2007). Beyond the political ties, the influence of the Nazis was obvious in the banning of 1939s Confessions of a Nazi Spy and Chaplin’s famous 1940 The Great Dictator, both blatantly anti-Nazi films, by a large portion of Latin America. The Rockefeller and the CIAA were reorganising FDR’s Good Neighbour Policy to attempt to combat this influence, and to attempt to bind the hemisphere together in opposition to Axis powers that had recently begun the war in Europe. By the late 30s Hollywood were also looking to Latin America to assist the Good Neighbour Policy (Berndt Morris & Morris 2011) as well as to possibly supplement the lost income from all the theatres in Europe that were closed to them by then (Adams 2007).

In 1941 Rockefeller’s CIAA fully funded sending a team of Disney animators, musicians, cinematographers, technicians, etc. on a two month tour of Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, and Peru (Adams 2007). Their mandate was to create something that would read to Latin American audiences as “authentic” (Berndt Morris & Morris 2011) and, however mixed their success, Saludos Amigos succeeds by giving “pride of place to the creative process of the Disney team: how they experience Latin America and transform their experiences into image, movement, and sound” (Hess 2017, p 111). As I will explore later, I feel that the abandonment of this format lets down the sequel The Three Caballeros.

Both of these films are essentially a collection of shorts; however Saludos Amigos is much more clearly structured into independent sections, as different characters show up and more clearly in different countries. The whole thing is narrated as a kind of travelogue by Fred Shields.

The film begins with the main theme for the movie, sung by a male choir that, as pointed out by Hess (2017, p 113), are either “nonnative speakers of English, or they are trying to sound as if they were”, immediately establishing the tone of international community that the film itself is attempting to foster. We are shown live action footage of the Disney team boarding a plane, and taking off, before quite smoothly transitioning to an animated map where the plane flight south is depicted. The plane flies through Rio de Janeiro (notably the country is spelled ‘Brasil’), Buenos Aires, and then inland over the Argentine pampas before the plane splits into two and we initially follow the one heading to Lake Titicaca in Peru. This whole sequence is brilliantly conceived as the map has numerous perspectives of major landmarks that the planes fly past slowly enough for the viewer to absorb.

The first travel section is in Lake Titicaca, Peru, and we are shown the plane landing in live action as well as people navigating the lake, and general village life around. A man is shown playing a flute, which then transitions to “a celebrated North American tourist” Donald Duck looking out over the lake, and experiencing altitude sickness. Donald tries piloting the balsa reed boats and demonstrates that they might be sturdy, but they aren’t impervious to Donald the Duck. He then wanders around town and meets a local child who controls llama’s with a flute. Donald gives that a go and annoys the llama by playing a jazzy tune. The llama and the duck then go up the side of a cliff and have shenanigans over the town on a suspension bridge.

Next we fly over the Andes to Chile where Shields informs us they weren’t allowed to film. We are shown footage of the artists beginning work in the plane, and several gorgeous paintings or drawings (I’m not clear what all of them are) of scenes they saw while crossing the Andes. Shields then tells us they were inspired by tales of the first mail planes to cross the Andes and we are shown early sketches of Pedro the baby mail plane, before transitioning into the short itself. Pedro is from an air-field near Santiago, and we are shown glimpses of his life, including studying “reading, sky-writing, and arithmetic”. One day his parents are too sick to make the flight across the Andes so he must do it the first time. His flight from Santiago to Mendoza is relatively uneventful, except for passing slightly closer to the dangerous mountain Aconcagua with it’s unpredictable weather patterns (helpfully given a truly ominous scowling face so we really know it’s bad news). Pedro picks up the mail bag and is having fun chasing a condor (or vulture?) and doing some fancy tricky flying before coming face to face with Aconcagua by mistake. He attempts to get out of there but a storm sucks him in. He attempts many ways out of the storm and almost loses the mail, but is eventually able to make it above the storm, but runs out of fuel just as he rises above the storm clouds. We cut back to the airfield where his parents have just given up when he manages to slide in seemingly out of nowhere. They open the bag and find a single postcard which reads in Spanish “”Having a wonderful time, wish you were here” and is addressed to Jorge Délano Coke of Topaze, a Chilean magazine, who hosted Disney and his team in Santiago” (Hess 2017, p 123).

A beautiful animated map shot takes us back across the Andes to Buenos Aires and we are shown a number of gorgeous live action shots of the city before we see Argentine artist Florencio Molina Campos showing Disney his art depicting life on the pampas, and particularly of the gauchos. The Disney crew are treated to a rodeo and asada (Argentine barbecue) as there is traditional dancing on the stage. The fade to animation shows a US cowboy in Texas before we recognise Goofy on a horse. He is magically transported to the pampas and given gaucho clothes to experience what life is like for the Latin American version of the cowboy. He demonstrates number of the skills of the gaucho, but always getting it slightly wrong (for example when singing at night we hear a beautiful rendition of Yo soy la blanca paloma (Mess 2017) before it’s revealed through a skip that he’s actually lipsyncing to a phonograph). Importantly (and this will be returned to later) the butt of all the jokes is always Goofy in this sketch.

Finally we return to the most elaborate map animation yet with Rio de Janeiro and live action footage shows the natural beauty as well as street cafes and wonderful street mosaics, which are then shown in their paintings and drawings. We are also shown footage of a parrot watching them work and then a Brazilian woman demonstrating the basic samba step. We are then treated to a rendition of Aquarela do Brasil (Watercolour of Brazil) by Brazilian songwriter Ary Barroso and performed, in Portuguese, by Aloysio Oliveira. True to the name a gorgeous sequence is animated almost akin to a speedpaint of a brush bringing a watercolour rainforest landscape to life. A splash of blue paint becomes a waterfall that rushes to fill a riverbed that is drawn around it as the landscape is revealed by its twists and turns. A series of things are drawn, then changes into other things, for example a bunch of bananas has a splash of black added then becomes a flock of yellow-beaked toucans. A bee flies up to a flower then is swallowed by the pitcher plant, which then becomes Donald Duck who burps the bee back up again. He watches as José Carioca, a new Disney character based on the green Brazilian parrot, is drawn in front of him. Carioca takes Donald into Rio and shows him around before taking him to try Cachaça. Donald breathes out fire to light the Parrot’s cigar before being hit by the booze and starting hiccuping a beat. He’s told that’s samba before the brush reappears and dips into the cachaça bottle then paints a number of instruments to play samba music. We’re then shown Donald dancing silhouette behind a window as the camera pulls back to a wide shot showing a gorgeous painting of the whole of Rio, the camera continues to pull back to show us the painting on a board.

Saludos Amigos is, at heart, a propaganda film. And I think it succeeds at being exactly as authentic as it paradoxically needed to be to be both good and achieve the effect it needed to. It shows a real love (albeit a prosperous tourist’s love - we’ll get to it momentarily) of Latin America and takes pains to show the domestic US audience the urban western-ness of the southern continent - something that came as somewhat of a shock to said audiences at the time (Adams 2007). Both Aquarela do Brasil and Tico-Tico no Fubá (a choro song that plays when Donald asked Carioca what samba is) are still extremely popular and successful to this day both in Brazil and abroad (Berndt Morris & Morris 2011). The film was not only successful in the USA, where it received seemingly self-congratulatory praise, but it also “impressed Latin Americans … playing to great acclaim in major cities in Argentina and Chile” (Hess 2017). I think that a large part of how this film works so well is that it feels authentically like a reaction to being immersed in a culture for a short time. The artists being shown on the planes and in situ working on their sketches and drawing the things that take their fancy sets up wonderfully for the shorts that follow. By including the viewer for a small part of the creative process, the shorts do not read as the definitive declaration of the culture, but as an outsider’s interpretation of the things that they saw. This brings a level of authenticity which previous Good Neighbour Policy films had struggled with (Berndt Morris & Morris 2011). As well as this there is an obvious care paid to the music throughout the film. As Berndt Morris & Morris (2011) as well as Hess (2017) both argue that despite falling short in some areas, the music for this film largely succeeds at tying local Latin American sounds into a more typical US soundscape, and I would say that this is done with great success.

Now the astute reader will remember that this post is titled as being for BOTH Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros and may be extremely worried around the 1700 word point that we aren’t even halfway through this post. Not to fear. I did not enjoy The Three Caballeros and don’t intend to cover it in the level of detail I have for the first film.

The Three Caballeros is another anthology of shorts with a focus on Latin America (in this case largely Mexico), this time with the framing device of Donald Duck opening presents and them containing film reels, picture books, and somehow even friends from Latin America.

The first story is about a penguin who doesn’t like the cold so travels north on an ice boat to find a tropical beach. The predictable happens when the sun is found but he finds a tropical island anyway

Next is the story of a gaucho child named Gauchito who goes hunting for condors one day but finds a winged donkey instead. He uses it to win a horse race but is discovered at the last second before claiming the prize money and escapes to the sky, never to be seen again

Then José Carioca pops out of a present and we are transported into a pop-up book version of Baía (wikipedia tells me it should be spelled Bahia, but the film uses a different spelling and I’ll stick with the film on this) where live action people are dancing and singing in what appears to be an animated city. Donald hits on a woman and eventually gets a kiss on the forehead (obstructed from the camera view for obvious practical reasons) before leaving.

Then a new character emerges, a Mexican Rooster named Panchito. He takes them through a magic book to live action shots of Mexico with the Disney characters animated on top of them. Donald Duck becomes more lecherous towards women, then they arrive at a beach and the “scantily clad” women flee him with no men in sight. Then he seemingly goes on an acid trip where a woman sings to him from the stars, then flowers, and I fully lost the plot at this point. A cactus turns into a woman who dances aggressively at Donald while cacti hit him from time to time, then turns back into a cactus, a voice whispers “pretty girls” repeatedly while flowers filled with live action women’s faces appear around donald. It feels like what I imagine an acid trip would feel like, and not in a pleasant way.

Mercifully the film ends eventually, and I am left trying to find a way to summarise why I disliked it so much without spending forever inflicting it upon everyone who reads this. To begin with, the authenticity that was so important to Saludos Amigos succeeding is completely absent. Without the acknowledgement of the artists’ hands, and the 4th wall destroying act of showing us their creative process, there is a much higher level of discomfort that I had with the US company telling me about Latin America. Donald Duck’s lechery was not that prominent in the previous film, but here he calls so many women “toots” so many times that I was wondering if the image of a US tourist chasing women who clearly don’t want anything to do with him was as damaging in Mexico then, as it would be today. The creative animated sequences are well done, and the acid trip sequence would be impressive, but it is so unmoored from what has happened before, and the live action elements so jarring and/or uncanny, that I simply lost the thread. Where Saludos Amigos was able to walk a razor's edge, and be a piece of propaganda that was nonetheless an interesting tribute to the countries it was trying to woo, The Three Caballeros read to me as not only thoughtless, but likely counter-productive even as propaganda. I am grateful to move on from this film, but worried that the remaining four package films from the 40s will take more after Caballeros than Saludos Amigos, but join me in the next week or two (finding one of  these may be a problem) to discover if my fears are founded as we continue through the package films.

REFERENCES

(yes, that’s right, the blog post has citations and a reference list)

Adams, Dale. 2007. “Saludos Amigos: Hollywood and FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24 (3): 289–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509200500486395.

Berndt Morris, Elizabeth, and Charles Morris. 2011. “Walt Disney and Diplomacy: The Musical Impact of Aquarela Do Brasil.” In Latin American Music Center’s Fiftieth-Anniversary Conference Titled “Cultural Counterpoints: Examining the Musical Interactions between the U.S. And Latin America.” Latin American Music Center. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/15542.

Hess, Carol A. 2017. “Walt Disney’s Saludos Amigos: Hollywood and the Propaganda of Authenticity.” In The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles, edited by Josh Kun, 105–23. Oakland, California: University of California Press.