The Three Caballeros was the follow-up movie to Disney’s previous effort, Saludos Amigos. Both of these movies were made as a goodwill offering with the countries in Latin America to help with peace treaties between countries in World War II. Saludos Amigos was kind of like an “animated documentary,” where there was documentary footage of these Latin American countries, mixed with animated shorts exploring aspects of the culture. I expected The Three Caballeros to be more of the same, but these movies couldn’t be any more different from each other in my opinion.

First of all, The Three Caballeros takes a different approach. It’s about Donald Duck having a birthday, and receiving Latin American-themed presents for it. These presents wind up teaching him more about the culture, and he gets to interact with different aspects of the culture with the help of two friends, Jose and Panchito. So, The Three Caballeros is similar to Saludos Amigos in the sense that they both feature a series of animated shorts about Latin America, but past that the movies are wildly different in style and structure.

First of all, the animation definitely seems to be more of the focus in this movie. We follow Donald Duck for the vast majority of the movie, and so we see things from his perspective. However, this movie is actually notable for being the first feature-length movie to mix animated characters with live-action actors, and we see this when Donald, Jose, and Panchito visit these countries and interact with the humans there. For being the first attempt, it’s done really well. They do it both ways too, where the animated characters are in a real world, and where living actors are in an animated world. Sometimes you can tell it’s fake, but I do think it’s mostly very well done.

This movie is just really crazy, though. It starts off pretty grounded in the same way that Saludos Amigos was, but it quickly dissolves into utter chaos, especially when Donald meets Jose and Panchito. Donald is chasing after women (no joke, this is the horniest that you’ll ever see Donald Duck act), Jose is smoking cigars, and Panchito is just firing off pistols randomly. It’s insane. Also, the blend between live-action and animation eventually goes into really strange places. This is one of the most beautiful animations in an early Disney movie I’ve seen, but it seriously makes you feel like you’re on a drug trip a lot of the time. I say this as a warning because if you don’t want to see something that goes completely off the rails, you might want to stay away.

Personally, though, I actually really liked The Three Caballeros, definitely a lot more than I did Saludos Amigos. It’s a really entertaining movie, and one of the more forgotten Disney classics in my opinion. I’ve seen criticisms that it’s more style than substance, and I can understand that because it is definitely true at times, but this really didn’t bother me. I found myself very entertained throughout most of the movie, and so I had a really fun time with it. Know what you’re getting into with this, but definitely check it out if you’re interested.

4/5