Donald Duck celebrates his birthday opening several presents from his Latin American friends and with his friend Jose the Parrot from Brazil, and Pachito the Rooster from Mexico is given a vibrant energized look at Brazilian and Mexican culture and music with several strange and surreal tangents.
Following the success of Saludos Amigos which had come about from the State Department's Good Neighbors Policy to improve relations between neighboring South American countries whom had diplomatic and commercial ties to Axis powers such as Nazi Germany, Walt Disney Animation studios returned to produced a spiritual follow-up with The Three Caballeros which basically serves as a sort of expansion on the Saludos Amigos. While not a direct follow up, the film did feature the return of Jose the Parrot as well as the same mixture of Live-Action and animation footage, but this time the film gets more experimental with many sequences built around the concept of Live-Action characters interacting with animated characters in one of the earliest attempts at doing so that would later be revisited with more technical polish in Song of the South. Caballeros was a solid success upon its release making more than Dumbo's run and raking in $700,000 in Mexico alone. There's a lot of energy in Three Caballeros and on a technical level it ambitiously (but roughly) mixes Live-Action and animation to good immersive effect, but with a rather anemic plot and repetitive structure the movie begins to feel its length.
The animation and art direction while not the pinnacle for a Disney feature film is still really strong probably falling just shy of the level of Dumbo in terms of technical craft. The characters and designs are lively and energized, and there's a surreal but colorful and party like atmosphere to the film that immerses you into the songs, dances, and environments. While the live action/animation hybrid style is still very much in its infancy with certain sections with the characters not as well incorporated as the filmmakers want(some scenes feel like the characters are floating in the foreground), it's still a very strong effort regardless and show's the possibilities with the medium in such a format. Some sequences such as the Acapulco sequence where Donald not only has a drop shadow, but also interacts with elements in the environment including beach blankets and bodies of water.
Story wise it's a pretty thin set up with Donald celebrating his birthday and each present leading to a different segment. The first present is a film strip which is basically a bunch of four to seven minute shorts tied to Latin American culture in some fashion. The shorts are varying degrees of okay playing like standard Silly Symphonies that just happen to be loosely strung together. The next present he opens is his Brazilian present with a pop up book that contains Jose the Parrot that serves as our framing device for the Brazil segment, and lastly Donald's present from Mexico with Pachito the Rooster which is pretty similar to the Brazil segment save for the final 15 minutes where the segment goes off the rails with surreal imagery of dancing flowers and cactuses that seems like it's trying to out do the Pink Elephants scene from Dumbo in terms of "wha?" and basically forgets any plot the movie might've had at one point instead going through a series of increasing bizarre and exaggerated imagery until the film's final crescendo.
You could watch any twenty minute stretch of Three Caballeros and feel entertained and engaged, the problem is with all these segments strung together playing at the same jubilant level for nearly the entirety of the film's running time it becomes quite exhausting to sit through and the film's constant energy became more draining than exciting as the film went on. Disney chopped pieces of this film up for broadcast on TV programs like Mouse Works or Mouse Tracks and given the structure of the film that's really the best way to experience this movie, in small manageable segments rather than taken as the gauntlet it is. In terms of its historical value and technical merit there's a lot here to appreciate from the dances, to the music, to the crude but innovative mixture of Animated characters in live-action environments, but with its thin plot and near constant levels of exuberance Three Caballeros is like a party that starts out fun, but as time wears on your looking for an excuse to leave and head home.
