I saw The Three Caballeros (1944) once when I was very little, but all I remember is the theme song and wondering why the other two caballeros with Donald weren’t Mickey and Goofy. This film is better known than its thematic predecessor, Saludos Amigos, because of more frequent theatrical and home video releases, but it’s essentially another package film, and another tour through Latin America as seen through the Disney lens.
- The opening sequence, which is also the framing sequence throughout the film, is Donald celebrating his birthday (Friday the 13th) and receiving presents from Latin American friends. He receives a film projector and gets tangled in the screen while setting it up and stays remarkably composed, given his well-known history of anger management issues. The first short he watches is called “Aves Rares,” or “Strange Birds,” and Donald indicates birds by making a shadow puppet of wings and flapping them. He makes the shadow puppet of wings with his…wings. It’s very confusing. It’s like making a shadow puppet of arms with your hands. Why not just use your arms? I spent so much time thinking about this that I missed most of the strange birds.
- Pablo is the titular (heh) star of the next short, “The Cold-Blooded Penguin.” He’s a penguin at the South Pole (or “Polo Sur”) who hates the cold so he makes his bathtub into a boat to sail to a nice warm South American island. It’s a fun cartoon but there’s a bit at the end where the bathtub is filling with water and he’s frantically trying to bail it out, and it only works if we don’t know that penguins can swim. Which is something they’re actually pretty well known for. I’m okay with a penguin having a bathtub but my suspension of disbelief only goes so far.
- More strange birds of South America! Did you know that toucans can’t make love because they wallop each other with their beaks whenever they try to kiss? No? Me, neither. I’m beginning to think that this feature is not living up to its remit to educate its audience about Latin America.
- “The Flying Gauchito” is about a little Uruguayan boy named Gauchito (“Little Cowboy”) who, while out hunting condors finds a winged donkey named Burrito (“Little Donkey” – think about that the next time you order the beef at Chipotle). First off – hunting condors? That’s a thing? Second, it’s here that I realize how much Spanish vocabulary this movie is hurling at us with no explanation, just plopped in the middle of otherwise English sentences. It’s like the screenwriters for this flick were Dora the Explorer and El Dorado from The Super Friends. Anyway, Gauchito enters Burrito in a race and he wins but then Burrito’s wings are revealed and everyone accuses him of cheating and so they fly away and – in the words of the older Gauchito, who’s narrating the story – “Neither him nor me was ever seen again as long as we lived.” The end. Uh…okay? That was abrupt. Did you fly into the upper stratosphere and freeze to death? Did you go off and live happily in the Andes with your donkey-bird? I feel like there’s more to this story. It’s all very “Poochie died on his way back to his home planet.”
- Hey, José Carioca is back! He’s that sketchy Brazilian parrot from Saludos Amigos. This oughta liven things up. José takes Donald on a tour of South America, which eats up the rest of the film. Baía is first, which is lovely (it looks like foreign money) although the song is a little dull. They jump into a pop-up book to interact with the locals, including singer Aurora Miranda (sister of Carmen, who was a famous entertainer mostly remembered for wearing a hat made of fruit). Donald and José go ga-ga for Aurora in a particularly unconvincing mix of live-action and animation. Aurora has crazy eyes. Maybe it’s from having to interact with rear projection so much, but I’d play it safe and stay away, fellas.
- I can’t understand a damn word either of these birds is saying.
- Before we resume our tour, we finally meet the third caballero – Panchito Pistoles, representing Mexico. They sing the title song – “We’re three happy chappies, with snappy serapes, you’ll find us beneath our sombreros…” and then they all fire guns into the air. And it’s still less offensively stereotypically Mexican than what I saw on Univision at the laundromat this morning.
- And suddenly a group of big-headed Mexican children straight out of a Little Golden Book are teaching me about the true meaning of Christmas and it’s all very earnest and it has something to do with piñatas and I have to check to make sure I’m still watching the same movie.
- That last segment is where this movie really goes off the rails and never comes back. It’s not bad – it’s kind of great – it’s just insane. The trio of birds fly over Mexico on a magical serape taking in the sights. Why don’t they use their wings? Don’t ask silly questions. Donald starts horn dogging it again on the live-action ladies. Cartoon birds love live-action ladies. They fly over Acapulco Beach and all three birds go nuts dive-bombing the hot bikini babes. There are no men, by the way – they must all be at a different beach. (Can I go there?) The interaction between the actors and the animation is much better in this segment – at one point the beautiful ladies catch and bounce Donald in a blanket and it’s flawlessly done. I completely bought into it.
- And then Donald drops acid with the animators, that’s the only explanation I can find for this last section. His unnatural lust for human women has finally driven him mad. I don’t even know how to describe it. He’s up in the sky gathering stars and he’s chasing this singer and then there’s a woman dressed like a flower and then he dances with an adorable cactus lady and José and Panchito keep appearing and inexplicably tormenting him and the flashing colors and the noise and I think the filmmakers had some issues to work out. And then Donald gets inside a bull costume made of fireworks and bullfights with Panchito but then José lights the fireworks and they explode and that’s the end of the movie. (Add tequila, churros and a donkey and it’s a trip to Tijuana I took in 1996.) The Three Caballeros isn’t a bad flick. Some of the travelogue sections get a little dull, but the humor veers between classic Disney and batshit crazy, both entertaining in their own way. Plus the theme song is catchy as hell. I give it two and a half caballeros.
