Sometimes I lie awake at night...

Sep. 23, 2020 at 1:54pm with 14 notes

Saludos Amigos (1942)

In the wake of the Disney animators’ strike and the end of the studio’s Golden Age with Bambi (1942), Disney’s industry rivals and the upstart United Productions of America (UPA) stood to benefit from the terminations to come. After seizing control of Fleischer Studios from Max and Dave Fleischer, Paramount set up Famous Studios – against the Fleischers’ sensibilities, Famous Studios doubled down on appealing to children while continuing the Popeye the Sailor and Superman short film series. But Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and Warner Bros., though neither were making animated features, had most to gain from Disney’s misfortune. MGM would pool its resources into self-referential, highly suggestive short films that could never exist under the Disney banner. The works of William Hanna, Joseph Barbera, Fred Quimby, and especially Tex Avery flourished. Under MGM, Barney Bear, Droopy, and Tom and Jerry became part of the American animated canon.

Elsewhere in Burbank, Leon Schlesinger Productions, partnered with Warner Bros., became Disney’s crosstown antithesis. Schlesinger, as arrogant a person as Disney was socially awkward to his employees, harbored no illusions that Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes could ever compete with the sheer artistry of Disney’s Golden Age features and its Silly Symphonies. Fostering the talents of Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Tex Avery (before his defection to MGM), Bob Clampett, and Robert McKimson, Warner Bros. – in a studio as ratty as Disney’s was pristine – operated anarchically. In this culture spawned a style that leans into anything that might make an audience laugh. No matter how outrageous a proposed story’s premise or behavior, Schlesinger would not be one to say “no”*. Take the characteristics of Mickey Mouse and friends and maximize them. As a result, you have the wiseassery of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, the situational ineptness of Porky Pig and Wile E. Coyote, and the dimwittedness of Elmer Fudd. Warners’ films had a disorderly, unrestrained (and sometimes callous) energy that Disney’s animators were on record of being envious towards.‡

Disney’s animators wanted to channel some of this mania into their next two films: Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros (1944). Both films are the result of Walt Disney’s 1941 goodwill trip to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Peru, organized by the United States Department of State. The United States was concerned that South American nations might sympathize, if not outright ally with, the Axis. Thus, the federal government offered loan guarantees to Disney’s financially struggling studio if Walt would partake on the tour. Walt agreed, with an ulterior motive – he could leave his brother Roy and studio counsel Gunther Lessing to handle the post-strike wave of layoffs. With Norman Ferguson, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, and Bill Roberts as supervising directors, Saludos Amigos is the first of the Disney “package films”, and the result of vastly conflicting interests. It is an inconsistent film, its comedy overshadowed by the Looney Tunes series, and the first non-masterpiece Disney animated feature after five inspiring triumphs.

Saludos Amigos is barely a feature film, clocking in at forty-two minutes (the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Film Institute, and the British Film Institute all define a feature as a film longer than forty minutes). As such, the movie is essentially a selection of four glorified, narratively unrelated short films. Also included is behind-the-scenes footage of Walt Disney’s entourage (“El Grupo”; including Walt, Lee Blair, Mary Blair, Norman Ferguson, and Frank Thomas) to transition between segments. In order, the segments are: “Lake Titicaca” (Peru), “Pedro” (Chile), “El Gaucho Goofy” (Argentina), and “Aquarela do Brasil” (Brazil).

Beginning with “Lake Titicaca” – named after the eponymous lake on the Peruvian-Bolivian border – the film opens with a Donald Duck short. In the years just before Mickey’s appearance as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia (1940), Donald Duck had briefly overtaken Mickey Mouse in popularity. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the studio enlisted Donald Duck to be the center of its World War II propaganda – it would be hard to imagine Mickey Mouse going to war. Donald’s appearance in “Lake Titicaca” is a rare non-propaganda outing for the barely understandable duck. It just so happens to also be a lazy Donald Duck short. The best Donald Duck shorts exploit his infamous temper – gradually. Instead, Donald is subjected to what amounts to a travelogue where his tourist’s mentality occasionally endangers him. Though it may not be the prototypical Donald Duck piece, the segment adds nothing to his characterization. The narrator reveals brief, exotifying factoids that could not have played well to a presumably Latin American audience – something that colors the rest of this film.

Next up is Peru’s Andean neighbor, Chile. “Pedro” follows the daring of the anthropomorphic mail airplane of the same name and packs in a lot of storytelling in just several minutes. Pedro, the child of Papá Plane and Mamá Plane (wait, some will say – planes don’t grow as they age!), is tasked to deliver the mail across the Andes when Papá comes down with a cold. Why doesn’t Mamá Plane fly the mail? “High oil pressure” – but knowing the boys’ club that was the Disney studios of this era, that probably isn’t the real reason. Pedro must brave the turbulence as he ascends over the Andes, and especially as he nears Aconcagua. At 22,837 feet (almost 7,000 meters), Aconcagua is the tallest mountain outside Asia – and with a mountain of that size, it invariably creates its own unpredictable weather.

Flight in the 1940s was still a relatively risky proposition, and “Pedro” captures this during the stormiest sequences that define its closing minutes. As the most inspired moment not associated with “Aquarela do Brasil”, these moments are made possible due to the special effects honed in during previous Disney animated features and a crashing sound mix that sells the danger that Pedro faces. To its credit, this second chapter of Saludos Amigos feels the most like a potential feature film that went unrealized. “Pedro” does not suffer as much from exotified elements in comparison to other segments in Saludos Amigos. But nevertheless, it inspired Chilean cartoonist René Ríos Boettiger (“Pepo”) to create the character Condorito, a comic strip condor whose adventures are read widely across Latin America.

In Argentina, we find “El Gaucho Goofy”. This third part adopts the tone and style of the How to… series (1944’s How to Play Football, 1950’s How to Ride a Horse) featuring Goofy. It might as well be entitled “How to Be a Gaucho”. The omnipresent narrator imparts culturally specific terms and Gaucho equipment that spontaneously appear for Goofy to react to. As always, the narrator is moving too fast for poor Goofy, who can barely keep up. This is hilariously subverted in the scene where Goofy is pursuing a rhea (a distant relative of the ostrich) while on horseback. A fast rewind occurs, and the scene is played back in slow-motion. But it is obvious that the scene has been re-animated in slow-motion and the narrator has also recorded his lines to fit the hilarity on-screen. This is a hysterical touch and a rare (and effective) instance of a mid-century Disney movie breaking out metatextual jokes. “El Gaucho Goofy” also boasts Argentinian artistic input – illustrator/painter Florencio Molina Campos served as consultant for this segment, The Three Caballeros, and Fun and Fancy Free (1947). Campos’ style (muted colors and an emphasis on the Pampas’ skyward horizon) and preferred subject material (life on the Argentinian Pampas for Gauchos and their families) are apparent across “El Gaucho Goofy”. The segment undoubtedly benefits from his influence.

Moving north, the film ends with “Aquarela do Brasil” (“Watercolor of Brazil”). The segment is framed by an extended cover of the song of the same name composed by Ary Barroso and sung by Aloysio Oliveira – the song was popular in Brazil at the time, but Saludos Amigos vaulted the composition to international fame . Easily the most abstract of the four Saludos Amigos chapters, it also adopts a conceit later replicated in Chuck Jones’ Duck Amuck (1953) in which the background, foregrounds, and characters are painted by an artist’s brush onto a previously blank canvas. “Aquarela do Brasil” features Donald, but also marks the debut of the cigar-smoking, samba-dancing parrot, José Carioca. José (pronounced with a hard “J” in Portuguese) is Donald’s fun-loving foil dressed in malandro attire, but this clash of personalities will not be as apparent until The Three Caballeros. Following the interruption of José’s introduction, the film resumes with its splashy, colorful, romanticized abstractions of what life in Rio de Janeiro is like. It is the better and more aesthetically interesting Donald Duck short film when compared to “Lake Titicaca”, if mostly because José Carioca is a scene-stealer.

If the transitions between the descriptions of the four segments in this review feels abrupt, that is because there is little to no transition between the four segments of Saludos Amigos. Each segment is a hard reset after the last, and the supervising directors make no attempt to establish any linkages between them. It results in pacing issues that make “Pedro” – the most narrative-dependent of the four – feel much longer than it is.

When released in the United States, Saludos Amigos surprised American viewers. For many, the film upended their preconceptions of Latin America as a dour, unfashionable, and backwards place. Americans – rarely regarded as being worldly people – who saw Saludos Amigos more positively viewed their southerly neighbors. For Latin American audiences, interest in American culture, already deeply immersed in Hollywood movies, solidified. But for the Latin American governments in power during World War II and after, Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros’ intended aims had a muted effect – especially in Argentina, which waffled between the Allies and Axis due to its historic rivalry with Great Britain and its sympathies to Nazi Germany.

With a muted reception, Saludos Amigos begins the package era of films within the Walt Disney animated canon. For the next few years, Walt Disney and his animators would be making mostly propaganda short films for the United States government. These propaganda works helped stabilize the studio’s finances, if nothing more, and reflected Walt’s increasing political conservatism. His turn to the Republican Party for the remainder of his life was not due to long-held political convictions, but the outsize influence of studio counsel (and hardline anti-communist) Gunther Lessing on Walt’s political opinions. Walt Disney’s artistic soul would rarely surface over the next few decades, following the bitter disappointment of how the later Golden Age animated features were treated by audiences and critics. In the meantime, the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank kept their focus on fulfilling government requests for propaganda pieces, and now resembled more of an industrial factory than the happy, extended artistic family Walt had once sought.

My rating: 5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

* Even Schlesinger’s successor, Edward Selzer (who took control in 1944 when Schlesinger sold the studio to Warner Bros., renamed “Warner Bros. Cartoons, Inc.”) – described by Chuck Jones as humorless and more intervening – came to respect the instincts of the animation directors and gag men.

‡ Disney animator Dick Huemer on Warner Bros. animated shorts: “It was like admiring the kind of dame that you couldn’t introduce to your mother.”