The Three Caballeros


This Walt Disney film from the mid 1940s is only interesting for two reasons. The first is it was one of the first films to mix live action and animation (in the same shot). Even today, watching it so many years later, I was wondering at some points how they were able to achieve this effect. The other strange aspect of this movie is Donald Duck is a real horn dog in it. He seems to be immediately in love with any attractive woman he meets - and as he meets a lot of attractive women in this adventure, the lust of Donald Duck is really something that makes you question the people who made this film. It's kind of like the Howard Duck effect. Although it's kind of creepier because Howard the Duck is somewhat human sized and Donald at least in this movie is duck sized, so I don't know what he's thinking there. The other thing that I noticed while watching this is that when we moved to realistic animation, computer generated animation, I think we lost a lot of the creativity of animation. There's a scene where Donald Duck is in a song but his form changes into an instrument, and it's multicolored, and it's spectacular. We don't see that kind of pure animated art any more - and that's a shame. This particular film is not great - it lacks narrative structure - and is just an excuse to display this new technique of mixing live action with animation. If you are interested in the history of film or animation it's worth watching, but if you want an entertaining film in a similar vein probably you should choose the Reluctant Dragon or Saludos Amigos.


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