SALUDOS AMIGOS
USA. 1943. Sequence Directors - Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Ham Luske & Bill Roberts, Story - Homer Brightman, Joe Grant, Dick Huemer, Harry Reeves, Roy Williams & Ralph Wright, Music - Ed Plumb & Paul Smith, Music `Aquarela do Brasil - Ary Baroso, Musical Director - Charles Woolcott, Art Supervisors - Lee & Mary Blair, Jim Bodrero, Jack Miller & Herb Ryman. Production Company - Disney. Voices: Clarence Nash [uncredited] (Donald Duck), Pinto Colvig [uncredited] (Goofy), Jose Oliveira (Joe Carroca), Fred Shields (Narrator)
Plot: A group of Disney artists go on a tour of Latin America in search of inspiration. The results:- Donald Duck takes a comic tour of Lake Titicaca and the Chilean mountains; when his father falls ill the young mailplane Pedro must make a perilous mail pickup across the treacherous Andean range but runs afoul of storms created by a famous bad-tempered mountain; the cowboy Goofy is transported from Texas and transformed into a gaucho in the Argentinean pampas regions; the parrot Jose Carroca takes Donald Duck on a singing-dancing tour of Rio de Janeiro.
`Saludos Amigos' was made by Disney during The War. It was a time when conscription had gutted the pool of available Disney artists. Disney dealt with this by downsizing from feature length animation to portmanteau-styled animation anthologies - with the likes of `Melody Time', `Make Mine Music', `Song of the South', `Fun & Fancy Free', `The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad' and `The Three Caballeros'. And, although none of the anthologies were really bad, this diversion into these compilation anthologies was a considerable comedown from the heights Disney had climbed at the beginning of the 1940s with the likes of `Dumbo', `Pinocchio' and `Bambi' and for several years the studios grace fell in the public eye. It took until the 1950s for Disney to return to feature-length animation but even then many of the features somehow felt lesser films and there was the sense that some Golden Age of Disney animation that had passed away never to be regained.
`Saludos Amigos' has one of the most unique concepts ever tried in animation - that of the animated travelogue. At the time it was made the Latin American market held one of the largest fan audiences of characters like Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. And along with `The Three Caballeros', it shows Disney trying to tap directly into this market - in some segments here even the background lettering comes in Spanish which suggests that Disney was thinking of the Hispanic market even ahead of the English-speaking one.
The whole exercise has clearly been conducted as an experiment and as such it is somewhat hit and miss. As the travelogue it sets out to be, it is rather cursory, only visiting four Latin American locations - Lake Titicaca, The Andes, Argentina and Rio - and leaving the rest of the region untouched. And for a feature it is surprisingly short - only forty minutes in length - it could easily have supported at least two or three more segments.
The first, third and fourth segments keep fairly much to the travelogue format but the second seems really more of an original short. The first and third segments are the most consistent in tone, using familiar Disney characters in lively slapstick scenarios to demonstrate the features and culture of the various regions. The `Portrait of Brasil' segment, sort of an impressionistic samba number, is the slightest. However the second segment is a pure delight where the Disney animators' penchant for dewey-eyed anthropomorphism in the characterization of the baby plane is utterly gorgeous - it struggling through storms with a mail bag tucked under its wing, coughing and spluttering as it runs out of fuel, going to school to learn `reading and sky-writing' and the like. This is one segment that one wishes had been longer.
Copyright 1998 Richard Scheib
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