What Fascinates Me

Thanks to Brian for the fascinating pick this month. He alludes to the fascination these films hold for cultural studies and film studies scholars as ideological texts. I haven't delved into those readings yet, but I was struck by a trope that Peter's post gets at: the feminization of Latin America. The Three Caballeros (US, Brazil, Mexico) of course are the key powers in the Western hemisphere that the Good Neighbor policy sought to align. By figuring Latin America as feminine, the film implied a masculine paternalist role for the US. It legitimizes the Monroe Policy in the World War II world stage. 

But Brian's post asks how we begin to understand the film as film. I'd suggest a few areas that fascinated me watching Three Caballeros. First, abstraction. Disney films of this period could often veer away from representation proper into a play with visual and aural elements. And its approach to representation in general showed a visual inventiveness. My favorite moments tended to be the most purely abstract ones:

Second, the blend of live action and animation. Normally, I'm not a fan of the blend (maybe bad 70s examples soured me as a child), but I loved the interplay between the two spaces here. Shadows, for instance, could reflect from real objects onto drawn ones...



... and in the process make the three-dimensional live-action person look flat and unreal. Or, shadows could be cast from the animated characters onto a live action space...

Finally, I was interested in the film's use of optical printing. For instance, there are several moments of freeze frame:

But particularly striking are the rain-wipes that create dazzling watercolor-y effects.

These effects interest me because they show a greater Hollywood lexicon of effects in the mid-40s, but also because they take effects with fairly conventionalized use in live-action films and give them a different function in the animated film, either more playful or more expressive.