I Watch Every Disney Movie In Order So You Don’t Have To: Saludos Amigos
For this blog post, I will be talking about the seventh Disney movie: Saludos Amigos. For all you English speakers out there, “Saludos Amgios” means “Greetings Friends”. This was the shortest Disney movie so far running at 46 minutes. It is another anthology film where there is no true plot to the film, but instead we are blessed with more Disney shorts.
The film is based around a couple of Disney animators traveling to Latin America to get inspiration for, I guess, their new film. They first head over to Lake Titicaca where the first of four Disney shorts begins. This one stars Donald Duck as he is a tourist amongst the locals. It’s a fun and colorful scene as he is trying on all of the clothes and becomes friends with the locals. He then befriends a llama as he plays what looks like a flute to control the llama’s position. They find themselves on a suspension bridge and of course, Donald gets scared and starts freaking out. The llama finds his way on top of Donald as he is trying to get across safely and ultimately, Donald falls all the way down into the lake with a bunch of pottery. The end.
We then move to Chile, where we are greeted with three planes. The papa plane, the mamma plane and Pedro, the baby plane. Pedro is the only plane that was able to get a name I guess. Pedro is tasked with having to go to Mendoza to get “air mail” when his dad is sick with whatever it is airplanes get sick with. His journey to Mendoza is pretty simple granted he has to pass this scary looking rock, but he manages to hide behind some clouds to get by. When he successfully picks up the mail, the journey back to Santiago is not as easy as it was leaving Santiago. First, he’s a little too confident, he’s flying around, having fun, which, okay I guess is okay. Then he sees this bird who messes with him so now he really diverges from the path. Then he comes across the mountain that looks like it has a face. It’s raining and thundering and lighting and Pedro is trying so hard to fly above the storm when…..BOOM he runs out of gas. Maybe if he wasn’t so cocky before he would have had enough gas to make it home, just saying. He plummets to the ground and we don’t hear from him again……or so we THINK. As mom and dad are looking for Pedro, he comes out of nowhere hopping around with the one letter in his bag. He has completed his mission, somehow. The end.
The next short takes place in Argentina and stars the infamous Goofy. This short is basically one of Goofy’s narrative “How-to” shorts where the narrator is explaining how to ride a horse out west. There are a lot of mishaps as everything humanly possible goes wrong for Goofy. Goofy demonstrates how to catch an Ostrich and then it backfires and he ends up catching not only the Ostrich but his horse and himself. How? Who knows, it’s Goofy. Then we have him setting up his horse’s saddle where he later finds out could be a bed and the horse instead, uses Goofy as a bed. Lastly, Goofy and his horse sit in the desert and “play” music (from a record player) and dance and have fun. Then Goofy manages to find a way to catch on fire and is catapulted back to the village in a big container of water. The end.
Lastly, we find ourselves in Brazil where we are introduced to Jose Carioca. He is a green parrot who loves music. He befriends Donald Duck and they dance away and make music to “Watercolor of Brazil” or in Portuguese Aquarela do Brasil. We get to see all of the amazing colors as they are painted on and it just sort of ends abruptly.
Thats the end of the movie, it doesn’t go back to the people traveling through Latin America it just ends at Brazil with Donald and Jose. In the end, there isn’t much to report about this film. It was actually a very informative film as it was sort of like a documentary about Titicaca, Chile, Argentina and Brazil. I learned a few things, but it was nice to finally have a bit of culture in a Disney movie. The lesson I gathered from this film: Take a trip to Latin America and beware of the llamas.
