Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

film foray: THE THREE CABALLEROS 229
dominant North American discourses on Latin America. Of the many animated
fi lms produced between 1941 and 1945 from the material collected
during Disney’s three trips south of the border, the 1945 release of The Three
Caballeros clearly demonstrates that the United States was using the same
old prescription in the lenses through which it viewed Latin America.
This half-animated fi lm begins with the typically clumsy Donald Duck
receiving from his Latin American friends three birthday presents, which
subsequently frame the movie into three parts. In a cinematographically
refl exive move, the fi rst gift that Donald opens turns out to be a movie projector.
He tangles himself up in the projector’s screen and ends up projecting
the fi lm on his hind feathers. Then the fi lm “teaches” him through voiceover
narrative about his feathered relatives to the south. One of them, Pablo
the Penguin, succeeds in fi nding a way out of what he deems his miserable
icy abode in the South Pole to a tropical island (part of the Galapagos) where
he is decked out in shades and swimming trunks and ends up sweating in
a hammock while a slow but willing, native turtle serves him cold drinks.
This fi lm within a fi lm continues with an almost wholly didactic, Disneyesque
taxonomy of bird species of Latin America. It ends with the exploitation
of a magical bird-donkey who is put to work winning a race for birds.
The bird-donkey wins the race but is disqualifi ed when he is discovered and
converted back into a mere donkey with wings.
In the second and third sequences of The Three Caballeros, animation
using technology that would eventually allow the success of Who Framed
Roger Rabbit? combines with live action as two other caballeros, the Brazilian
parrot Joe Carioca and the Mexican rooster Panchito, make their appearances
along with three famous Latin American actresses, the Brazilian
Aurora Miranda, and Mexicans Carmen Molina and Dora Luz. In these sections,
Donald’s feathered friends show him their countries by way of picture
books that come to life. In scenes reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Through
the Looking-Glass, Donald and the others enter into these animated frames
and become participants in scenes of women dancing, singing, and frolicking
as they are pursued by male admirers. Donald’s emblematic clumsiness
becomes sexualized in his own relentless pursuit of the beauties of Latin
America, as the fi lm departs from conventional Disney patterns of apparent
sexlessness.
In “Don (Juanito) Duck and the Imperial Patriarchal Unconscious,” Julianne
Burton, a professor of Latin(o) American visual media at the University
of California, Santa Barbara, articulates the “death” of the Disney fi lmmakers
of The Three Caballeros. She shows that the fi lm doubles back on its
stated objectives of reimagining a relationship with Latin America; instead,