Zorro-Disney Series (Season 1)

Zorro (1958) is a series created by the Walt Disney Company based on the stories of Johnson McCulley. Disney decides to continue the Zorro tradition that by the time has been going on for more than 30 years. Most of its direction is credited to Norman Foster, however, the series is a collaboration with other directors such as Lewis. R. Foster, Robert Stevenson, John Meredith Lucas, Charles Barton and Charles Lamont, who put together two seasons of about fifteen to twenty hours each, making this series the longest Zorro storyline in the tradition, and also the most popular one (at least before Bandera's interpretation of Zorro in 1998). Though of its popularity, this series continued to be cataloged among commercial B-movies, together with previous serial versions such as Republic Pictures' series. Though this series length requires creating more stories and additional characters which differ from the first Zorro movie, this incarnation of Zorro might be one of the most traditional ones and the closest to the original version since Johnston McCulley himself was involved in the development of the serial.

Norman Foster take us to the traditional time and location of McCulley's "The Curse of Capistrano". It is 1820 in the old Spanish California and Don Diego de la Vega (Guy Williams) has just arrived from his temporary stay in Spain to Los Angeles. Even before the ship gets to the pier, he and his mute assistant Bernardo (Gene Sheldon) are informed about the tyrannical government that Capitan Monastario has imposed to oppress the poor, the Indians, and the just blue-blooded aristocrats of the region. Don Diego believes that his duty as a loyal subject is to defeat all of the Crown's enemies, and to do so he will hide his intentions behind the mask of Zorro, while pretending to be a coward man interested only in literature and music in front of everyone else, even in front of his father Alejandro de la Vega (George J. Lewis). But he is not fighting alone. Bernardo who is also highly skilled at sword and whip fighting adopts a second identity to help his master (Bernardo pretends to be a silly deaf-mute instead of only mute but smart) and his fast and well-trained horse called Tornado will make of Zorro an invincible legend.

California is presented as a beautiful place to live in and to take advantage of for people around the world. Its location, resources, but also its instability as a colony of the Spanish empire after the Mexican emancipatory revolutions have attracted the most ambitious men who will try to use their influence to destroy anyone who steps on their way. Spanish occupying positions in the highest power hierarchies because of their names and appearance reflecting aristocratic or even royal ancestry become Don Diego/Zorro's nemeses. Don Diego, however, does not condemn the special privileges of being aristocrat or Spanish, neither he critiques colonialism. The problem arises when those are corrupted or lead to unacceptable treatment. What is acceptable or what is not is obviously determined by the elites, thus things like increasing taxes for the poor and the rich is considered unjust, but making indigenous work without any pay for the church's missions or as servants in the aristocrat's houses are seen as not only as just, but they are the necessary means to guide the Indians towards civilization.

A plot in support of European elitism is a characteristic of the traditional Zorro movies because of the period in which it takes place when Spain had legitimate control over California. However, in this series, the underlining "good" social constructions imposed on Californians by the Crown are challenged as the storyline goes on, and the elites (like the De la Vega family) will use their powerful influence to protect and differentiate their Californian from Spain.

Don Diego opposes the enemies of the Crown, but on top of it, as Zorro, he fights in the name of California, even if this means breaking the conventions of his aristocratic class and of his Spanish roots. During the first quarter of season one, Zorro fights the corrupted Captain Monasterio, but after defeating him, new threats appear to destroy the beauty and wealth of California, and the tranquillity of its people. These new enemies are each time people closer in the hierarchy to the Crown and those conflicting loyalties develop in Zorro and in all people of the village a stronger feeling of patriotism but not towards Spain, but towards California. The Californio identity rises as Zorro also become part of California's cultures through legends and songs. While children dress up like Zorro fighting with swords made out of wood, Zorro, the De la Vega family and many other Californian aristocrats get ready to go on a civil war against those trying to destabilize the peace of Los Angeles and the rest of California. Soon they will realize that the enemy is the appointees of the Crown themselves.

The last part of the first season tells us a lot about the construction of the Californio identity which becomes more visible because of the tensions of a possible civil war. The Californio identity and patriotism appear as the civil war creates a sense of "otherness" towards the foreigner. Interestingly, the dual identity of Don Diego/Zorro seems to fade away under these circumstances making Don Diego act as Zorro without the need of wearing the mask to cover his face. He starts to get more involved in the matters of California's governance, he tricks and fights his enemies, and he opposes injustice, whether this comes from criminals or if this part of the Spanish law. The Californio identity is also defined in relation to other identities. Though that in many aspects such as in culture and traditions California is a mix of Spain and Mexico, Californians consider themselves totally different from both. This is especially true after we start hearing about the Mexican independence war. From here Disney made clear that California is not part of those newly independent Mexican states mentioned in the series. And despite the fact that people know they are subjects of the Spanish King, the attempts to control and exploit the people and resources by every Spanish that arrives in Los Angeles will soon make all Californians remove the "Spanish" from Spanish Californio when referring to themselves. One thing can be clear, California might separate itself from the Mexicanidad, but it cannot escape its own Latin American essence.

One of the additions Norman Foster made to the original Zorro storyline is introducing the character of "The Eagle". Like Zorro, the Eagle has a second identity. During the day he is Jose Sebastian Varga, the new California's Magistrado, but at night he becomes the Eagle, a far-right wing Galindo that wants to re-built Spain's lost grandeur. For that, the Eagle will try to take control of California and sell it to other countries such as England, France, and Russia. England and France retire their offers when they realize that Varga lied about the state of California, but the Russian count retires only after he knows the people cannot be contained even with force.

This first part of the Disney Zorro portrays California in interesting ways. For the language and the culture, it perfectly fits under the Latin American umbrella, but at the same time, Californians have developed a totally different identity. Zorro is the personification of that identity and its evolution. We see that as the threats against California become sounder with the civil war, the courage and mobility characteristic of Zorro (performance of Latino personality) show up not only in the unmasked Don Diego but in all the patriotic people trying to defend California, from the richest to the poorest. California/Latin America is as well the scenario in which different countries expose their weaknesses and strengths. We see a Europe in decay trying to take control of California because of its gold, its haciendas, its wine, and everything that makes it seem like a paradise. We are also exposed to the idea of a growing Mexico approaching with its revolutionary ideas, the fear of the little left from Spain in California.

Like other Zorro incarnations, the plot of Disney Zorro implicitly projects events in history and its effect on Hollywood. Douglas Fairbanks' Zorro provided Latin America and California with a hero right after the Great War. This renewed Zorro appears after the Second World War after which European countries became dependant on The U.S wealth, just like it happens in this series, though California is not considered part of the United States yet.

Jungle 2 Jungle

Jungle 2 Jungle, an English version of the French film Un indien dans la ville (and apparently the original is no more distinguished than the remake), belongs to the "Fish out of Water" genre of intercultural comedy. A primitive tribesman finds himself in the big city. His uncouth ways are shocking and unexpected in his new urban environment. Hilarity ensues. But the joke is on us when it becomes clear that the metropolis is a jungle, too, and that an outsider can get things done by applying third-world native lore to first-world problems. We leave the cinema educated as well as amused. Or at least, such is the film-maker's gameplan.

Here Tim Allen plays Michael Cromwell, a harassed and work-obsessed Manhattan trader who makes a trip to Venezuela so as to sign divorce papers will his long-separated wife. She, it turns out, is a doctor in a remote indigenous village that is accessible only by boat. Naturally enough, the boatman leaves Cromwell stranded, so he has to learn rather more about the local tribe than he had expected... including the fact that one among them, a child named Mimi-Siku, turns out to be his thirteen-year-old son. The two of them end up returning to New York, where the young savage is the object of equal amounts of curiosity and revulsion, for instance for his habit of seeing any nearby animal (pigeon, cat, or exotic fish in a tank) as a potential tasty snack.

Meanwhile, a subplot plays on rather different notions of globalization and cultural difference. Cromwell has made an ill-judged trade in buying up several hundred thousand dollars of coffee futures, which are now in free-fall on the global markets. He tries to offload them on a Russian gangster, thinks better of the deal and buys them back, but then the price of coffee unexpectedly goes through a roof. Thinking himself to have been swindled, the Russian bad guy seeks revenge. But young Mimi-Siku shows the value of his warlike ways by helping to fend him off and send him and his henchmen packing, vowing never to return.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this otherwise cliché-ridden film comes in the final credits. It turns out that the film-makers hired a "Pemon anthropologist," presumably to show some nugget of authenticity and cultural respect in their portrayal of the Venezuelan indigenous. It turns out that this same anthropologist, one Diana Vilera, now makes a living with a Venezuelan NGO that is associated with a wide variety of multinational oil companies; she is also Total's sustainable development manager, as advertised in the French oil giant's report on "social responsibility and local development". If her work on Jungle 2 Jungle is any indication, however, Vilera is happy enough to let the most outrageous caricatures of indigenous culture gain her implicit seal of approval.

Yet the film has no real desire to show us the true face of Venezuelan tribal society. Its interest is far more focused on the urban jungle of Wall Street rather than the rural jungle of the Gran Sabana. Mimi-Siku's performance of primitiveness is a mere foil by which to cast a mildly satirical light on the lives of self-obsessed Manhattanites. Hiring an anthropologist is no more and no less a figleaf for Disney than it is for Total. But perhaps it is an admission in both cases that some kind of palliative offset is required to keep corporate consciences clean. It's the sign of an anxiety that even when these high-level capitalist flunkeys are mocked, they are still somehow let off the hook; for after all, it is only their lifestyle that is targeted, not for instance their indifference to the effects of the commodities market on anyone's personal security but their own.

Melody Time

Watching Melody Time is a reminder of how very, and rather surprisingly, odd Disney can be. Nowadays Disney is so fully woven into popular culture and everyday life that it has lost much power to shock. Moreover, Disney has changed over the years. But in the 1940s the strangeness of animated cartoons must still have been apparent; although in other ways the films of what Michael Flint terms Disney's "weird years" were very much of their time.

The very notion of animation, putting a voice or feelings to an inanimate object, is uncanny from the start. The famous "Sorcerer's Apprentice" sequence from 1940's Fantasia is an allegory of the possibly sinister consequences of this power to give apparent life to things. Even the somewhat more benign gesture of anthropomorphizing animals (a mouse, a duck, a dog) can be perturbing: even as it makes them more like us, the sense of a difference between human and animal never quite disappears. And the entire Disney enterprise is certainly a break from realism, which could be regarded either as a return to some archaic notion of the magical or as an investment in more modern conceptions of the surreal, of the fears that plague our cultural unconscious.

Over time, Disney and Disneyfication has become more familiar, both in the ways in which it is received and in the ways it portrays itself. But Melody Time is a good example of the ways in which, at least earlier during the last century, the corporation was torn between a homely version of mass culture on the one hand, and a rather more experimental adventure into the avant garde on the other. And there is little attempt to unify these tendencies or make them cohere by means of some over-arching narrative: Melody Time gives us seven short, unconnected sequences that never quite come together.

The homely is represented here by the first sequence, a Winter scene of two lovers skating on a lake and then, with the help of some animal friends, avoiding near disaster. Also, in more ideological vein, we're presented with a sequence that provides a romanticized vision of the American folk hero Johnny Appleseed, complete with Indians dancing in harmony with white settlers in celebration of the apple harvest. But another sequence, featuring a jazzed-up version of Rimsky-Korsakov's "The Flight of the Bumble Bee" is very different. The bumble bee in question is half-terrorized by an increasingly abstract set of animations: nightmarish flowers, a prison-like stave, and falling piano keys, all to a combination of Russian classicism and American boogie woogie.

In short, the film problematizes Peter Berger's famous account of modernism as constituted by a sharp scission between mass culture and avant garde. Disney's modernism combines aspects of both. And while we have become accustomed to Mickey and friends permeating mass culture, the vanguardism returns with a shock when we watch a film such as Melody Time.

Perhaps it is by realizing Disney's complex and comprehensive modernism that we gain new insight into the corporation's Latin Americanism. For there's a resonance with the modernist impulses that seemed to course through a country such as Brazil at the time, visually represented by the famous patterns woven into Rio's sidewalks that feature prominently in the Latin sequence here, "Blame it on the Samba." And there's also an equally modernist fascination with the primitive, here the various African-influenced rhythmic instruments of Brazilian music.

"Blame it on the Samba" is a surreal portrayal of Donald Duck and his two avian compañeros Joe Carioca and the Mexican Panchito (first introduced in The Three Caballeros). Donald and Joe are feeling and (literally) looking blue. Panchito is a waiter at a restaurant "composed" of a musical score. To rejuvenate their spirits he mixes up a potent cocktail of Brazilian music: "You take a small cabassa (chi-chi-chi-chi-chi), One pandeiro (cha-cha-cha-cha-cha), Take the cuíca (boom-boom-boom-boom), You’ve got the fascinating rhythm of the samba." He then dunks his two guests in an enormous snifter, before diving in himself. Deep in the drink's murky depths is organist Ethel Smith, almost as extravagantly behatted as Carmen Miranda herself, who appears in live action combination with the antics of the suitably enlivened caballeros.

Things get really odd when Panchito takes a stick of dynamite to this underwater (undercocktail?) musical scene. The organ explodes, though Ethel continues playing none-the-less. It's as though she hasn't noticed that Disney has turned everything upside-down; that especially with its explosive Latin cocktails (one part mass culture, another part avant garde experimentation, a third part primitivism), Disney undoes any sense of familiar continuities. But the band plays on regardless.

YouTube Link: the entire "Blame it on the Samba" sequence. (Hat-tip: Latin Baby.)

"Pluto and the Armadillo"

"Pluto and the Armadillo" was, apparently, intended as a sequence within Saludos Amigos, but ended up as a stand-alone short. And indeed it follows the same pattern as the feature-length movie, with its educational pretext (we're told how to pronounce "armadillo," for instance), but above all in that it shows a Disney regular interacting with a Disneyfied representative of Latin America's native fauna.

Mickey and Pluto are on a fifteen-minute stopover in Belén, Brazil, and playing on the airport tarmac with a ball that they've brought along. Mickey throws the ball long, and Pluto has to follow it into the nearby jungle, where he comes across an armadillo who, rolled up to protect herself, looks exactly like the imported rubber plaything. Hilarity ensues as first Pluto cannot believe his eyes in the face of this moving double of his own toy, then is gradually seduced by the cute face that emerges, before losing his rag and bursting the ball with his teeth. Disconsolate at the thought that he has killed his new Latin playmate, he reconciles with the creature when he realizes his mistake, and then both Pluto and the armadillo are dragged into the departing plane by Mickey.

So Pluto exchanges a bouncy ball for a live-wire, Samba-dancing armadillo. What's interesting here is the play of similarity and difference. From one aspect, when the armadillo is rolled up in defense, the toy and the animal are indistinguishable. But on closer inspection, and given a little bit of patience on the "turista americano"'s part, the armadillo reveals its distinctive rhythms, winning grin, and playful desire to be an active part of the game rather than mere plaything. And as Mickey scoops his charge up at the film's end, the same mistake and the same transformation are repeated: indistinguishable plaything becomes player with a mind of her own, albeit not exactly on her own terms. After all, the armadillo had never asked to be whisked away from Belén by air.

As always, there's little in the way of ideology at play: in a whistlestop pause on the South American continent, the Mouse machine grabs a Latin playmate, livelier and more fun than the mass-produced plaything he leaves in tatters on the jungle floor, and the onward voyage is sure to be full of incident as a result.

Bonus link: the entire cartoon is available at ManiaTV!

The Emperor's New Groove

The Emperor's New Groove is not the first Disney film to feature animated llamas: in an extended sequence in Saludos Amigos Donald Duck attempts to ride a llama, with predictably chaotic results. But the differences between the two llamas, and the two films, are salutory, and demonstrate perhaps the changing nature of Disney's relationship with its audience in recent years.

Saludos Amigos, as I have discussed before, presents itself as a quasi-educational, semi-anthropological exploration of the distinct and unfamiliar cultures found south of the border.

It is true that, as I have quoted Jean Franco saying of The Three Caballeros, in animating difference Disney also constructed a world that was distinctively Hollywood, more simulacrum than representation. But still it worked with and on found material to which it purported to maintain some kind of fidelity. So though Donald's llama is given anthropomorphic qualities, it is still recognizeably a llama, whose anthropomorphic animation brings it closer to the film's audience without eliminating altogether a sense of wonder at real world cultural difference.

By contrast, the llama in The Emperor's New Groove is no longer an animated animal, but rather the cartoon incarnation of what is already in the first place a cartoon character, an Inca ruler by the name of Kuzco who has been transformed into the beast by his wicked renegade advisor, Yzma. And Yzma herself is more a new incarnation of Cruella de Vil than a figure whose referents are to be sought outside the pre-existing universe of Disney tradition.

In other words, any claim to external referentiality has been definitively abandoned. Here, as in the movie's tagline, self-referentiality is everything: "It's all about me."

It would be pointless--and here more than ever, missing the point--to detail all the inaccuracies purveyed by this film. Suffice it to say, for instance, that though the civilization depicted is clearly based largely on the Inca empire, the opening title song states that we are in Mesoamerica, and at one point we see some children playing the typical Mexican party game of trying to break open a piñata.


So the culture purveyed is at best the image of some kind of generic pre-Columbian society, leavened (much like, say, The Flintstones) with aspects that are clearly only very slightly distanced versions of twentieth-century Americana, here most obviously the fast food restaurant to which Kuzco and his unlikely buddy, the peasant Pacha, repair for lunch.

But the film knows that its only referents are drawn from film itself, and indeed revels in the fact. It opens with Kuzco's voiceover commenting about the filmic process, and attempting to direct audience sympathy his way; early on, one of the characters is introduced as "theme tune guy"); and later, Kuzco also stops the film action in order to refocus our attention from a figure that he sees as peripheral to himself as protagonist. At one point Yzma's sidekick and love interest, Kronk, exclaims of one particular plot twist: "By all accounts, it doesn't make sense!"

In short, a double displacement is at work: first, from the US to Latin America in terms of the movie's ostensible content; but second, from external referentiality to internal self-referentiality, or perhaps better filmic self-consciousness and intertextuality.

This is not an "animated feature" in which a pre-existing story or history is transformed into caricatured form; it is a cartoon that pertains only to the world of cartoons. (Roger Ebert also notes the difference between animation and cartoon.) In this, it is closer to the Warner Brothers "loony tunes" than to Disney's traditional fare. Indeed, it is only the second Disney animation to present an original storyline, rather than an adaptation of a book, fairy tale, or the like. (And the first was The Lion King, which has serious epic or melodramatic ambitions wholly lacking in this light-hearted romp.) Meanwhile, the DVD commentary claims that this is the first feature-length animation to employ the trope common to shorter cartoons, of portraying characters stuck in a dark space by simply rendering their eyeballs.

(NB the film wasn't always going to be this way: its production history was troubled indeed, and what we have here is a much reworked version of a film originally to be called Kingdom of the Sun. See "The Long Story Behind the Emperor's New Groove" and "a precise and enlightening story of how Kingdom of the Sun became The Emperor's New Groove...")

As a cartoon, then, doubly displaced to its own alternative universe, the film is almost as abstract as a Mondrian painting, or perhaps a piece of classical music--better, the incidental film music that, in this movie as many others, works almost imperceptibly to build and fill in affective states. For The Emperor's New Groove concentrates on portraying affective and moral essences: Yzma, for instance, as a woman who is "scary beyond reason"; or Pacha as the epitome of goodness. In the film's own terminology, it portrays characters and their "grooves."

"Groove" isn't a bad way of thinking about affect. It captures the idea of a particular consistency, a particular capacity to affect and be affected, but also a certain proximity to habit: it takes of a shock to the system to jolt somebody out of their groove. We tend towards specific grooves, specific ways of grooving, in the absence of dramatic change. Here, the Emperor undergoes a series of disruptions (transformation into a llama, abandonment by his former confidantes, physical suffering) finally to change his groove, to habituate himself to a new affective state, to become generous rather than uncaring.

The film works to express, as only cartoons can, the purity of given characters' grooves, and to chart the inertia that prevents any easy deviations. (This is a constant theme in cartoons, where a change of state is always somehow delayed, always lags behind, archetypically when a character runs off a cliff and then hangs in mid-air before gravity suddenly, and belatedly, takes hold.) And it's in this displaced, cartoon version of pre-Columbian Latin America, with its vibrant colours and exaggerated imagery (green palm fronds, parrots, endless staircases, complex architectural patterns) that it can both express a groove and also imagine ways in which a groove can be changed.

Herbie Goes Bananas

"I love your country," says Harvey Korman as Captain Blythe at one point in this automotive caper. "It's very colourful, and the children have such expressive faces."

And Disney seems to have needed no more excuse than this to set its third (and until this year's revival, Herbie: Fully Loaded, also final) sequel to The Love Bug in what becomes an increasingly dislocated Latin America.

Herbie Goes Bananas is loaded down with colour and cliché, from Inca gold to a bizarre car-as-toreador bullfight. Its leading character is the Mexican child pickpocket, Paco, whose face mostly expresses first fear as he is pursued by his various victims seeking revenge or restitution, and then joy as he is repeatedly rescued by his friend Herbie, the VW Bug with a mind of its own. And the Latin America that this road/cruise movie traverses is dislocated as any sense of geography disappears in a puff of the VW's exhaust.

But let's try to trace the film's route nonetheless. It opens in Puerto Vallarta, to which our notional heroes, DJ and Pete, have travelled by bus to pick up the old racing car, Herbie. Here Paco steals their wallet, as well as that of one of the criminal combo who are looking to unearth Inca gold. Inadvertently, Paco transfers the negatives that are somehow key to the Inca gold discovery to DJ and Pete's possession. So the bad guys are also on his trail as he stows away on a cruise ship headed down to Rio, where Herbie is to race in the Brazilian grand prix.

At sea, the car is tossed overboard for various misdemeanours committed on deck, and DJ and Pete (along with newfound companions PhD student Melissa and her lascivious Aunt Louise) are told to leave the ship when it docks en route at Panama. Herbie (whom, incidentally, Paco calls "Ocho") has meanwhile managed to swim his way to Panama also, where the various characters, including now the stranded captain Blythe, take to the road again.

Here's where the geography goes to pot. Unremarked, the Beetle and its pursuers would seem to traverse the Darien Gap by road, somehow achieving the feat despite the fact that this is where the Panamerican Highway peters out. Paco tells Blythe shortly before the bullfight scene that "Panama's long gone, capitán." Which, as they are heading south, places them already in Colombia. Not long thereafter, from the middle of the jungle, the captain tries to get a message to his ship to wait for him in Tobago, while the bad guys are busy digging up an enormous gold disk of Inca gold, and DJ informs the assembled company that they are only twelve miles from an airport in Chiclayo--which would put them in the Peruvian coastal desert. A little later, as the party are presumably drawing towards Tobago (i.e. in northeastern Venezuela), we're told that they have driven (only!) 700 miles with their car blanketed in bananas. Oh, and Herbie's powers are ascribed to (Haitian) vodú.

OK, so verisimilitude is hardly a high priority for a film whose star is a car that can think, communicate, and act on its own.

What we have is an imaginary geography that pretty much respects the map from Mexico to Panama, but that consists in an extraordinary contraction once south of the canal. In South America itself, the South Pacific, Amazonia, and the Caribbean are all essentially contiguous territories. Remains of Inca civilization can be found right next to banana plantations, the nation state and the inconvenient obstacles of border posts disappear, as also do "customs" in the sense of localizing cultural traits.

"Why are we going in circles?" asks one of the criminal gang as they try vainly to escape in a light plane. Because, well because this is a topography of affective intensity (colour and childlike expressivity) rather than geometric extension. Unlike most road movies, whose aim is to chart a territory, to mark out its boundaries and investigate the spatial coordination of its customs and cultures, Herbie Goes Bananas describes endless circles to give a dizzying sensation of "south of the border disorder."

But there's no necessary value to be attached to affective intensity. And frankly, in this instance the car should have been left at the bottom of the ocean.

Saludos Amigos

Saludos Amigos, sponsored by Nelson Rockefeller's Office of Inter-American Affairs, presents us with a "good-will tour" of Latin America, undertaken by Walt Disney and his animators. As the accompanying documentary, South of the Border with Disney, puts it, "the visit resulted in a better understanding of the art, music, folklore and humor of our Latin American friends and a wealth of material for future cartoon subjects."

And indeed, the film features the debut of the Brazilian parrot character Joe Carioca, who would reappear in The Three Caballeros and go on to star in many, very profitable, Disney cartoons and strips made specifically for the Latin American market.

But it's not immediately clear what exactly Disney and co. may have given to their Latin friends in return, beyond innumerable sketches of Pluto (a particular favourite in Chile, we are told) and a rather disturbing regard for Gertulio Vargas's ability to choreograph massed ranks of singing children in Brazilian football stadia.


Meanwhile, the movie itself is a hybrid that combines travelogue, as the Disney party searches for "picture ideas" in the cultures and civilizations of Latin America, and four animated sequences, results of their search: Donald Duck as tourist in the Andes; a tale of Pedro the little Chilean mail plane; Goofy as Argentine gaucho; and Donald (again) meeting up with Carioca to explore Rio's sights and sounds.

In keeping with its documentary ethos, many of the film's drawings and images have a pseudo-scientific air; one is reminded of figures such as Humboldt and so eighteenth and nineteenth-century scientific illustrations of the new and strange flora and fauna encountered in voyages of discovery and exploration. Orchids, lilies, tapirs, Patagonian rabbits, and so on are presented and recorded in all their strange difference.

But this exoticism is tamed and made familiar as it is animated and integrated into Disney's own pre-existing narratives and cast of cartoon characters. For the wildlife are, equally, discussed as though they were candidates in a Hollywood screen test: Disney is searching for characters who can dance, play, sing, and interact with his established (and trademark) stars of Pluto, Donald, and so on.

Disney goes Latin (as Donald takes up an Andean pipe or plies a balsawood craft on Lake Titicaca) only to the extent that, and on the condition that, Latins (a llama or a Brazilian parrot) can go Disney. Here's the exchange implicit in good neighbourliness: Latin America is to open itself up as a market for US cultural exports, and in return, well, in return the North will give legitimacy to some of the region's less savoury regimes.

The Three Caballeros

I commented recently on how Latin America functions as the West's unconscious. Disney's The Three Caballeros is an extraordinary demonstration of this point.

The first half of the movie is a more or less conventional series of sequences. Donald Duck receives birthday presents from his Latin American friends that include a film projector and a reel of film, plus a book about Brazil. Donald sets up the projector then guides our viewing responses as we watch with him the tale of a mal-adapted penguin from the South Pole who looks for warmer climes further north. We are also introduced to an array of other Latin American birdlife, and are told the story of a Uruguayan flying donkey. So far, so Disney.

Things start to get a little stranger with the introduction of Joe Carioca, a Brazilian parrot who had made his first appearance in Saludos Amigos. Carioca takes us through the Brazilian book, shrinking Donald in Alice in Wonderland style so that he can literally enter into its pages. But these pages offer more, not less, of a sensation of reality than Donald's cartoon universe: within them, latinidad is fleshed out by means of a novel intermixture of animation and live action, featuring Carmen Miranda's sister, Aurora.

This proximity to Latin sexuality incarnate starts to turn Donald's head. And when Aurora kisses him, crossing the divide between cartoon and "real" life, his mind starts to explode in a series of images anticipating sixties psychedelia: lights, multicoloured balloons, frenzied dancing, spirals, lightning...

By the time that he and Joe meet the third of "the three gay caballeros," a Mexican rooster named Panchito, Donald has become an almost purely libidinal subject, keen to cavort, in what Jean Franco terms "a kind of erotic fury" (The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City 27), with bathing beauties on the beach at Acapulco.


"You are a wolf," Carioca tells him. "Take it easy." But Donald has begun to surrender to his id. And the final ten minutes comprise a bizarre insight into his psyche, as any pretence to narrative almost entirely disappears. Franco quotes the New Yorker review: "a sequence involving the duck, the young lady, and a long alley of animated cactus plants would probably be considered suggestive in a less innocent medium" (qtd. 27).

There are girls, flowers, nightmarish interruptions, transvestism, floating body parts. At one point we see Donald's head in the middle of the screen, superimposed onto a pink flower, while around him other flowers open to reveal images of women's faces looking on adoringly and a voiceover whispers "purty girls, purty girls, purty girls."

Jean Franco again, worth quoting at length:

Disney was not so much bringing to life universal dream-fantasies as inventing them. The Three Caballeros was a celebration of the pleasure principle freed from ethical considerations and responsibility, and most important of all, abstracted from a context while the technical innovation underscored the industrial superiority of the United States. The Three Caballeros heralded things to come. But it also invites speculation on the very idea of "animation"--giving soul and life to an inanimate object, a drawing, or a sketch on a piece of paper. The animated cartoon vies with the real and forecasts the power of the simulacrum that today draws millions of Latin Americans to Disneyland and Disneyworld. (28)