Does the fact that this film, The Three Caballeros, is not in any way an auteur film (in this case, I simply mean "authored" from one [or 2] mind[s]) make it harder to find an approach in which to discuss it?
I am asking because this might be the first time we've had a film of this kind as the film of the month. How does the ambiguity of its intentions and sources affect your view of it?
It is a tremendously interesting work, but it is not stimulating much discussion. And I guess I am just trying to figure out why.
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I think that's a factor. For me personally, I also rarely find animation of much interest. Not sure if this is prevalent among others or just me. I do know that within the Film Studies discipline, animation is relatively neglected. And when you don't have a solid foundation in the aesthetics of animation, it can also be harder to frame a work. I think that combined with the lack of auteur may be the reason.
I'm not sure it is necessarily harder to find an approach to it - but I think the approaches one might take are themselves harder. It seems to be a film you could read in a number of ways, that might be analogous to reading it as an auteurist film: as a Disney film, with the studio as auteur; as propaganda; as a kind of cultural imperialism (or not); as intertext, for all the film references it makes (Eisenstein, Berkeley, etc...) But I suspect all those approaches require more research than analysis. With auteur films, the basic information is usually available fairly readily - allowing you to spend your time working with the film itself (or films...).
True, it certainly isn't hard to engage in political discussion of the film, or to talk about it as a Disney film. But for myself, I need a certain aesthetic engagement to make the other contextual material really capture me. My own bias tends towards a more Bazinian perspective, and thus animation as a whole doesn't have the same impact. Obviously, I mean to state this as my own limitation, not the film itself (which I quite enjoyed and can certainly see defended on an aesthetic level) or, of course, animation as an art.
Marc, i think it is a limitation most of us share. It makes me think back to when I was in film school and I had an angry film history teacher that used to love to say "If sound wasn't forced upon film when it was, film would be the greatest art form in the history of the world today. it would be a true art. but now, it's nothing but filmed plays." (and i have heard or read this in different forms since then, which were probably where he formed it from)
But the reason i am thinking of this is because i am always, maybe unconsciously, thinking about this as a viewer and as a filmmaker. And when I see what i would call "true cinema", i mean something that really can be nothing but a film, It makes me excited for the medium. And, someone might argue that animation leans more toward painting the same way a "talkie" leans more toward a play, but I would say, in a case like this, where there is no narrative and it mixes animation and live action so refreshingly, that it is pure cinema and nothing else, particularly, because of it's disregard for time and space obligations. There are not a lot of films outside the experiment art film world that this can be said about.
So maybe we need to approach this in a way that we can address it's "pure cinema"tic nature; see this not as disney, a kids film, propaganda, or even animation. But as that rarest of treasures - "true" cinema.
Well, let me say this: I think talking about directors is often a great way to avoid talking about movies themselves. So a film like this one is liberating rather than limiting--unable to grasp an auteurist thread, we're forced to write about the film itself. But with this freedom there's a difficulty--auteurism provides us with a check list that movies themselves don't.
I watched the movie at the very beginning of the month and was astounded by it. It's now my favorite Disney feature. But I've had a hard time formulating an approach, because, in a way, I'm free to do whatever I want. And when you're free to do whatever you want, it gives your actions a certain weight. What was once a natural thing to write now has a doubt. Had I, say, a film noir here to write about, I'd have fifty years of tradition that allow me a way to approach the film's images--the idea of film noir, that feeling where every image is a close-up. How do you write about the images of a movie as free as this? Or the edits of a movie like this one, which is simultaneously liberated and unselfconscious--in other words, truly liberated. Maybe that's what I should write about...
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