Disney's New Spectatorship: The Three Caballeros

"My Rio, Rio by the Sea-o,
Flying down to Rio where there's rhythm and rhyme.
Hey feller, twirl that old propeller,
Got to get to Rio and we've got to make time.
You'll love it, soaring high above it,
Looking down on Rio from a heaven of blue..."

If Disney films more or less follow the Institutionalized Mode of Representation - that Monoform I spoke of earlier - then I posit that it's possible to string along all of the Walt-Era output in a line with Cinderella on one end as the least risk-taking, least challenging film and Three Caballeros as the most. That the two extreme ends in my model were made four year apart is a testament to how quickly Uncle Walt appears to have swooped in and "cleaned up" the animation department's act. No longer would Mary Blair aesthetics temporarily hijack a film and vanish just as quickly: now we'd have her all through or not at all. As the Johnston/Thomas school of character-driven animation asserted its' control following the fallout of Alice in Wonderland, humor driven animators like Ward Kimball retreated into their own projects and were increasingly relegated to minor character animation jobs. Eventually all the crazies over at animation were siphoned off to build Disneyland, so here, at Three Caballeros, is where the real epicenter is. The film looks and feels like it comes from another dimension, or perhaps was animated between visits by Uncle Walt when nobody was looking, it's so unlike Disney.

For one, the film hasn't a story-driven structure. It hasn't the chapter-type overt structure of the Post-Fantasias either, so it really is even more out of place than even the oddball Melody Time or Make Mine Music. It's often lumped with Saludos Amigos and sometimes The Pelican and the Snipe to form a makeshift "Latin America" cycle, which is more thematically than aesthetically sensible. As I've offered, Saludos Amigos is perhaps a better fit with The Reluctant Dragon and Victory Thru Airpower, leaving Three Caballeros high and dry with The Pelican and the Snipe which was, tellingly, a segment cut from the finished film.

Since we can't assess the film as a narrative piece nor as a chapter-based piece, operating as it does on a more European structure of incident, it may be useful to break the film down into units or "movements" to better aid our understanding of its' accomplishments.

MOVEMENT ONE:
Aves Raras / Pablo the Warm-Blooded Penguin
The Flying Gauchito

MOVEMENT TWO:
Baia
"Have You Been to Baia?" / Train Ride
Os Quindes de Yaya

INTERMEZZO:
Arrival of Panchito / "Three Caballeros"

MOVEMENT THREE:
Las Posadas
"Mexico"
Local Dances / Acapulco Beach
You Belong To My Heart / Jesusita

FINALE:
The Bull Fight

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Although in effect the film is a wide reaching and scattershot distillation of topics relating to the latin Americas, in structure and device the film is as carefully and well crafted as one of Disney's traditionalist narrative patterns. Although labeling the films' "acts" as "Movements" may rather over-credit the film as a whole, it is not accidental or lazy in construction. The first segment of the film - the stand-alone Pablo the Penguin short - is often cited as being irrelevant to the film. In reality it is a displaced "prelude" to the film as a whole - the supposed desire of the audience to escape to South America and a warmer climate is transposed to the comic Pablo, who eventually succeeds and traveling along the western coast of South America and sees a lot of imagery that will echo later in the film - especially a train and a city full of gaiety. As Pablo is introduced to the world so are we, and as such the literal escape from the cold climate of the South Pole to the equator is the replacement of our trip in an airplane "Flying Down to Rio".

This is just the start of the film's many echoes and transpositions, and it may be an intelligent but implicitly knowing gesture of the part of the filmmakers to begin the film with the most traditionally Disney and traditionally banal of the film's many movements. This section, where Donald is watching films on a small projection screen, may be the most traditional as a result of its' spectatorship being assigned to Donald - the films' representation of the average Yank - and as a side effect of being traditionally Disney it is simultaneously being traditionally American. The film can thus be said to have its' own pre-show film built in, and one of the characters in the film is our surrogate spectator and guides us through this first section!

Donald the Spectator

The film, like any other film, is a pattern of carefully judged gratifications, but the simpliest yet least overt may be the one promised by the title: The Three Caballeros. Yet twenty minutes will elapse before Donald meets another Caballero, then another twenty after that before all three are united. The occasion is celebrated with the singing of the main theme song, an event we have been prepared for before the film even begins. Before we are even shown the main title, "Donald - Jose - Panchito" are shown and labeled for us as the Three Caballeros. As a result the film is pattern of expectations deferred as we wait, and wait, and wait for the film to make good on the promise of its' title, a tension between content and label rarely achieved in motion picture film.

Each of the film's three "movements" corresponds to one of three caballeros, each a representative of a different country, and each country with a distinct color palette - blues and blacks for the American segment, pinks and yellows for the Brazilian segment, and fiery reds and oranges for the riotous (and longest) Mexico segment. Furthermore each movement has its' own material object which enables the action of the segment - Donald Duck is associated with motion pictures and projections. Jose Carioca and Brazil manifest as a pop-up book, and Panchito and Mexico are associated with the magic serape. That Donald ends the film actually wrapped in the serape is one of the film's best and most subtle touches.

Setting up expectations, deferring expectations

Donald's association with Film, Jose with the pop-up book and Panchito with his flying serape.

Other repetitions outside of the three major movements and three major modes occur throughout: there is a special emphasis on shadows and the shadow play as characters move across space, an overt recall of the American segments' use of the motion picture projector (the most complex shadow play yet devised). In the many portions of the film where live action and animation are blended shadows convey much of the effective integration of the two elements, where first the shadows of the Brazilian suitors to Aurora Miranda play across Donald and Jose in Os Quindes de Yaya, then later the shadow of the duck plays across live action spectators in the "Local Dances" passage of the third movement. Shadows loom throughout Quindes, especially where two Brazilian suitors transform into roosters in a shadow play cockfight which then is thrown on a field of red behind the live action / animated spectators in a Cubist-inflected animation style recalling Dick Tracy.

Another key element running through the piece is the integration of South American folk art throughout the film. The American segment "looks" the most "objective" (conservative), with the trademark Disney depth, color, and balance in animation and background. But there's nothing remotely like the explosions of colors around Aurora Miranda in Os Quindes de Yaya in the rest of Disney, an early apparition of the fireworks that will end the film, nor is there any precedent for the rising / setting sun in Jesusita which recalls Mexican folk art blankets flawlessly, subtly and tastefully. Whereas Saludos Amigos was about gringos in fantasyland, Three Caballeros is much more harmonized with its' subject, and much of its' radiant joy comes from the happy marriage of art and tact.

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As Three Caballeros progresses, the Donald character is pushed to increasing extremes of behavior, far further than he would ever be pushed by Disney. Compared to the gender neutrality of Mickey and Goofy, Donald is the most masculine, sexual Disney character: even his sexpot girlfriend Daisy at times appears to be such a parody of overboard femininity (destroying her house in fits of orgiastic jitterbugging in Mr. Duck Steps Out, 1940) that their competitive, aggressive relationship occasionally takes on the atmosphere of perversity, especially in the early shorts where she seemed less a girl and more of Donald's clone projection of himself dressed up in panties, eyeliner and pumps!

Three Caballeros features Donald as total libido. In the first movement he is relatively well behaved, but as the Brazil segment goes on he not only is pushed to increasing extremes of rage and desire - acting totally irrationally once he's at Baia - but eventually goes totally off the deep end at Acapulco beach. That segment of the film is its' lowest ebb, a succession of suggestive gags, but the spectacle of Donald cavorting in an erotic craze is something unknown to later, sanitized Disney. It is the last manifestation of the sexual maelstrom of male - female relationships in early Disney, such as Mickey's attempted assault on Minnie in the airplane of Plane Crazy (1928), snapping her panties in The Shindig (1930), and so on. Mickey's early sexual mania was transferred to Donald once the character was too embraced by conservative America to act naughty in his films, and here is both the apex and end of the sexualities of the Disney characters. Outside of an implicit "domestic relationship" between Chip and Dale in Out of Scale (1951), henceforth Disney was "clean".

Spectator and erotic object blurred:
Donald becomes his girlfriend:

Top; Three Caballeros. Bottom: Little Golden Book

That the brauvera final sections of Three Caballeros are to be seen as Donald's delirium of sexual desire is undoubtable, as he floats around from flower to flower where the bud of the flowers are women's faces and a filthy-minded sounding voice chants "Purty girl, purty girls, purty girls!" The traditional symbolic association between the flower and the female genitalia needn't be elaborated on for the "You Belong To My Heart" sequence, but the symbolism is inverted when the scene switches to "Jesusita" and now he hides from Carmen Molina behind a suggestive row of tall cacti which transform into various shapes, including images of himself.

Sexual metaphor in Three Caballeros

The film is then, in short, male gendered, made by men with the male audience in mind. That the trailer announces the three Latin American starlets appearing in the film much more aggressively than any other thing about it is telling, and most of the segments are about courtship - the symbolic nuzzling of the white doves in movement two's "Baia" transforms into the outright courtship of "Os Quindes de Yaya", and finally into the total orgiastic reverie of Movement Three. There are moments where gender is blurred of course, in the staggering moment where Donald transgenders himself and looks just like the conspicuously absent Daisy Duck, but also in a later, nightmarish image where the Caballeros straddle live action female legs doing a frantic shuffle. The image is made even more disturbing by the squeaky, sped up, repetitive version of the "Three Caballeros" theme on the soundtrack. As Jose and Panchito invade Donald's erotic reverie, the divisions between spectator and object of desire break down completely. That the film ends with three showers of fireworks - one for America and Donald, one for Brazil and Jose, and one for Mexico and Panchito may not be (in effect) as innocent as the films' creators probably intended.

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The symbolically loaded uniting of the Three Caballeros at the film's midpoint is an intermezzo of sorts - a deliberate break in the film's forward momentum with a lot of abstract humor (compare it to the unified introduction of Jose, who we of course have seen before in Saludos Amigos and are apparently familiar with). Panchito's arrival is even heralded by an overture of sorts, again recalling Mexican folk art, which sucks in Donald, transforming him from a silhouette in shadow-play to an mass of abstract lines, recalling the fact that he is himself made up of lines which could be in any shape and happen to be taking on the form of a duck, and eventually into a freakish pinata of himself which explodes, unleashing Panchito, a demigod of animation run amuck.

The sequence which follows is the best three minutes in Walt-era Disney animation. Ward Kimball's animation pushes the possibilities of combining humor with music into new directions, putting so many jokes into shots that it's actually distracting. The interplay between all three caballeros reaches a high ebb, a vaudeville routine complete at last, with Jose the straight man, Panchito the complete unhinged maniac and Donald the inept fool. A running joke in the film has been Donald's inability to perform the magic tricks of Jose and Panchito - he is, after all, coupled with the motion picture projector, a mechanical apparatus which can only bring the film-within-the-film to life but not progress the action - but his inability to do things like manifest instruments is a much richer and, more importantly, better suited to animation kind of humor than that found in the later Disney films.

Most importantly, the impression of this being the most manic scene in the film is primarily carried through Kimball's total disregard for spatial cinematic continuity. Characters will jump from one side of the frame to the next with no regard for the shots bracketing any particular shot, burst through shots, appear from irrational angles, etc. Earlier in the film the Arcuan bird played similar havoc with cinematic convention, actually jumping off the film strip to run around in black space at one point, a moment we have been prepared for by an earlier scene where Donald previews the Pablo cartoon he will watch by looking through the negative and dragging it down one frame at a time, mimicking the claw which drags down each frame of film twenty-four times a second in a film projector. He repeats the motion until he achieves full motion which we see on screen from his point of view: his view becomes ours, and the audience and the duck inhabit the same space momentarily, made aware of the illusion of film motion in the film. It's a strange moment which looks both ways as the in-theater projector projects its' own secret, in a way, itself. The film is as much about doing everything film can as carrying its' narrative episodes forward.

This episodic structure can be confounding at first, confounding as it does our expectations entering the film, but on close examination the segments essentially break down into three kinds of episodes:
+ Limited Animation (Baia, Mexico, etc)
+ Trick Shots (Os Quindes de Yaya, etc)
+ Overt Surrealism (You Belong to My Heart especially)

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Limited Animation
Limited animation, something that we are told Disney did not do, is actually prevalent throughout Disney - it's simply traditionally used as a transitional device between scenes, for example establishing shots, etc. One of Disney's most brilliant techniques of limited animation was the Multi-Plane camera. Labor costs were the same as in full character animation, but only those paintings / drawings for the illusion of depth were made. This is primarily the mode of limited animation in Disney, as it was in the early Warner Brothers animated "Spooney Melodies", where lazy-eyed organist Milton Charles crooned popular melodies at the camera and art deco style illustrations flew over/around him using simple tricks like a camera pan to send a Grecian ship sailing through the sky.

Disney dabbled in such effects at the time, including the Melody Time segment "Trees", which used primarily fades, pans and zooms to create motion. This is the original limited animation, recalling the early days of the Fleisher studio where drawings would be torn in half to remove a limb which was to be animated in the next frame. That it evolved to the style we associate with the UPA studio, late Chuck Jones and the Pink Panther / MGM shorts would be a much later devlopment. If we watch "Baia" with an eye towards looking at what is actually being animated in the frame, we find surprisingly little - but many beautiful matte-paintings, tracking shots, zooms and fades. There is one segment where water is animated using a superimposed special effect. The effect of this type of animation is lyric rather than manic, and "Baia" is the highlight of the film's many passages of pastorale gentleness. In this context Three Caballeros may be Disney's best paced film: the leisurely passages contrast, metrically as well as stylistically, the manic, surreal passages, and the push and pull of these two styles accumulates within the film until the finales' explosion of pyrotechnics.

The final two key limited animation segments are closer to a slide show than the dreamlike elegy of "Baia" - "Mexico", "Baia"'s companion number, seeks to achieve the same effect without pans or the multiplane, using instead fades and the familiar ripple-dissolve effect achieved with a pan of mercury seen to many Hollywood films of the era, especially and most famously the main titles of Gunga Din. "Las Posadas" is even simpler, panning across various beautiful Mary Blair pieces of artwork. There is, however, a subtle touch of movement in the flames of the candles held by the children, practically invisible but artfully done.

"Baia", however, achieves its' effect, the passage that even those who denigrate the quality of the Latin America Disney films bring up, and yet it is achieved with next to no animation in a supposedly animated film. It is a triumph of cinematic language in a pantheon of films with a dearth of truly aesthetically interesting formal technique.

Trick Shots
The "trick shot" passages of Three Caballeros, where animation and live action are overlaid, are generally speaking less successful than those in the next years' Song of the South, because they are achieved with much simpler means. Ub Iwerks' special effect shots are, however, brilliant, mostly achieved in the "Os Quindes" segment through judicious use of rear projection which can be, unless you know exactly what you're looking at, rather baffling. But the fingerprints of the man who built the first multiplane camera on the flatbed of a truck are not to be found in the act of projecting an image on a screen, but the details which sell the illusion.

In the early parts of the segment the blocking of Miranda and her suitors is very complex and Donald and Jose mostly stay on the sidelines, but as the action heats up, especially a segment where Donald is trying to knock a fruit peddlar on the head with a giant mallet, the timing is so precise and so funny that the illusion is totally forgotten. We only once, for example, see a mismatch between the foreground live action and animated background - a brief shot of Miranda's dancing feet while Donald looks on - which this author had been viewing for years without noticing. The climatic kiss is so carefully and intelligently judged that one actually feels rather bad for Miranda and how many times the take had to be done, but the effect is nearly subliminal. In later live action-animation films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Space Jam the moment where a cartoon character passes a live action character an object or touches them always looks a little dodgy, but here Miranda grabs Donald and kisses him full-on, and it's totally convincing until one begins to think about that screen behind her. It's a triumph achieved with blocking.

There are a number of other touches throughout "Quindes" which immeasurably help it. In an early shot a cardboard palm tree is wheeled between Miranda and the camera and the speed, so easy to mess up on such a trick shot, is perfectly synced to the moving background so that a real sense of movement is conveyed almost immediately in a short where the illusion is crucial. Other special effects artists would try too hard to have such effects throughout the scene, but Iwerks' deft, single gesture is not only more cinematic, but more professional. Similarly, Miranda's cookie tray is painted with a thick black line around it, creating a convincing illusion of being very well animated.

The dialectical relationship between live action and animation becomes less complex as the film goes on, now with Donald laid over live action with minor practical tricks to convey the sense of his interaction with the filmed segments. This does provoke, however, a key transformation in this film full of transformations: as the Caballeros prepare to head for Acapulco Beach, Panchito transforms the two-dimensional image in the scrapbook of Mexico (which structures the Mexican) sequences into a live action, filmed image which they may then enter. While Donald may not be able to work the magic tricks of his Latin American breatheren, his association with the camera in movement one is revealed to have its' privilege, as opposed to Panchito and Jose's pop up books and serapes.

Surrealism
If Surrealism often seems the dominant mode of Three Caballeros it is more due to the final movement and Finale's back-end loading of bizzare imagery and less to do with the Limited Animation and Travelouge portions of the film which constitute the bulwark of movements one and two, but the surrealistic segments are the most complex segments in Disney and thus cast a long shadow. These segments, in addition to the sexual / symbolic acts they represent, are primarily characterized through their repeated use of breaking the film frame. This happens in the first part of the film and is associated with the Aracuan, but at the opposite end of the film anybody can explode out of the screen.

One key influence of these moments at the end of the film appears to be Busby Berkley, who experimented with non-diagetic film forms long before anybody else in Hollywood. The aggressive, mathematical geometry of Berkley is purely cinematic in the same way animation is purely cinematic, and several moments in Three Caballeros, aside from the film's treatment of women as basically gendered dolls, directly recall Berkley, especially 42nd Street and Dames.

Top: Three Caballeros (1946) / Bottom: Dames (1934)

In this way Caballeros is emblematic of all of Disney's 40's era films, which are marked by radical experiments in content and form from which Disney would retreat hastily into the stifling sameness of the 50's era films. In some ways Disney was growing up, settling down from the wild and wooly barnstorming days of Steamboat Willie and Trolley Troubles, marked by strong technical innovations, into the comfortable patterns of something like Peter Pan. Peter Pan is comfort food. Three Caballeros, Melody Time, Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, and their ilk are chef's surprise, masterful but uneven. In their constant reorganizations of narrative, violations of continuity, aggressive pursual of audience distanciation and joyful pursuit of all that makes animation unique, they are the true artistic heart of Disney, it's finest moments rather than its' weakest.

Disney controls our perception of her by elevating the traditional narrative features, propagating the myth of story, downplaying the subversive aspects of their films and limiting our access to films such as Caballeros which seem truly anarchic. The public has responded in kind and accepted this traditionalist view of the traditionalist features, much in the way Hollywood has shrunk the public's tolerance for other films and other modes into the narrowest possible margin. All films must fit into a narrow category, and even the strange and subversive Alice in Wonderland, a film Disney himself hated, has been relegated to a "Hot Topic" interest group. Such limitations stifle the films and their art, and our perception of the films has been similarly stifled. Disney's fourties era films construct a spectatorship which is permissive, a spectatorship which challenges, opens up possibilities, rather than shuts them down and punishes us for transgressions, as Pinnochio is relentlessly punished for leaving home in both the Collodi book and Disney film.

They are, in short, neglected masterpieces in desperate need of acknowledgment by their curators, enthusiasts and film scholars in general.

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Further reading on Three Caballeros:
Of Mice and Magic, Leonard Maltin, Plume Press, 1987, 497 pages
Pato Donald's Gender Ducking, Jose Piedra, 1994, online essay
Latin Baby, Recca Pheonix, current, online web blog
Projections: Three Caballeros, 2005, online web blog
Walt Disney's Three Caballeros, David Netto, 2007, online web blog
The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, Jean Franco, Havard University Press, 2002, 352 pages

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That this article has been many weeks and, by extension, years in the works should be evident, as should its' unfinished nature. Rather than move on to Ichabod & Mr. Toad, I've decided to stop this series here, my interest in doing some writing on film at least momentarily sated. This essay is, despite its' appearance, far from comprehensive on matters relating to Disney's finest film. Great films force us to see challenging things in new ways, which I hope to have conveyed here. If you have anything to add, please do not hesitate to do so.

Disney's New Spectatorship: The Post-Fantasias

Walt Disney originally wanted to revive Fantasia on a continual roadshow basis, revising the film by adding and subtracting animated segments so that the film could perhaps be an evergreen film attraction, the equivalent of a touring variety show or a music hall all trussed up as High Culture because it was classical music. Amateur Disney psychologists would quickly point out that this was the first appearance of the impulse to revise which led to Disneyland, but for now let's simply consider these films seriously in a historical context.

Historically, Disney commentators have essentially had two reactions to the period from 1943 to 1949: that either these films weren't really worthy of appriasal because obviously Disney was "coasting" by failing to make a feature film story, or that the films were simply "better than expected" (which still implies that they aren't that great). But for a moment let's dismiss these from the context of the lean, wartime years of the studio and do something commentators usually only do for Disney when he makes something they actually like: take him seriously as a creative force. Fantasia was one of Disney's babies and he was crushed when the general public, the only real audience he took seriously, reacted to it with obvious apathy. And although he swore to not repeat the experiment again, everybody has seemingly ignored that he did, in fact, repeat the experiment, but not until after retreating to the environmentalist fable Bambi and the unexpected success of Dumbo. That Dumbo was the only film he didn't oversee personally and that it had been his only true success since Snow White must have been exceedingly damaging to Disney personally, and in some ways, he did retreat.

He retreated to his best idea, the Fantasia omnibus concept, but this time, instead of high culture imported from Europe and Russia, he would give them high entertainment from the home front. In concept and execution Saludos Amigos, Make Mine Music, Three Caballeros, Melody Time, Fun and Fancy Free and Adventures of Ichabod & Mr. Toad are Fantasia films done in that mode. But there would be changes. Now instead of Stokowski, Bach, and Beethoven, Disney would have The Andrews Sisters, Dennis Day, Bing Crosby and Freddy Martin. Instead of the deadening duration of Fantasia - over two hours - the films would clock in at just over an hour. And the atmosphere and strength of the presentation of Fantasia would be supplanted by a frantic pace and bawdy humor.

These Post-Fantasias are divided up into three pairs of six, with two "Latin America" films which take the form of travelogues, two split-feature films of longer duration shorts, and two true "Post-Fantasias". These two - Melody Time and Make Mine Music - are nearest in concept and execution to Fantasia, with meatier narrative shorts interspersed with shorter abstract pieces, some done in limited animation. There is no effort towards a larger cohesion, and no disguising of the fact that the audience is really just supposed to enjoy the music. The narratives are brief and simple, and rarely reach for a complex set of reactions from the audience. Those that do have become minor classics, while something like Make Mine Music's "Blue Bayou" is best forgotten aside from the fact that it lent it's name to a famous eatery.

The best segments of these were often broken off from the whole and televised or released to video separately: only recently have consumers been allowed to see the whole of The Adventures of Ichabod & Mr. Toad, for example, despite the familiarity of that film's two segments to anyone who grew up with a video player or cable. The bittersweet climax of Make Mine Music, "The Whale Who Wanted to Sing At the Met", is recognizable enough to have appeared in the preshow area of the attraction 'Mickey's Philharmagic' to general recognition, and the separate Melody Time segment "Once Upon a Wintertime", with its' Griffith-esque climax on the ice floes, was a staple of the holiday season on the Disney Channel for years.

Both of the films are fairly inadequate; they never build a very good sense of pace or incident, and without the concert framework which anchors Fantasia the pieces play as an hour block of short subject programming, not a satisfactory film. They lack the true sense of setup and payoff, even rudimentary, provided by the other compilation films, and they fail to maintain a consistent and appealing meter. The most frantic segments follow the most sedate, and instead of feeling like appealing variety, all the sense of fun is deflated. This is not to imply that they do not have their moments of true grace; Make Mine Music has the famous "Peter and the Wolf" and the aforementioned Willie the Whale segments. Melody Time goes all this one better by including two real humdingers among all the fluff, two real classics considerably better than the bulk of the material being animated in Glendale at the time.

Blue Shadows on the Trail / Pecos Bill

The main structural technique of Melody Time is that each segment is introduced by the animator's paint brush entering the frame and painting the short into existence (three years before Duck Amuck). Each short, unlike Fantasia, is preceded by a title card with the piece and the performer of the music, and some even have a bookending technique around the narrative. Like Fantasia, there is a narrator who introduces each short. All of this ensures that the audience is aware they are being told a tale, cued by the text introduction of a recognizable "name", subsequentally hearing the (then recognizable) voice of the name, and this is introduced by an omniscient narrator who only exists between shorts but not within them.

"Pecos Bill" is positioned at the very end of the feature and as such its' use of the "famous narrator" gag reaches its' climax in this section, where through Ub Iwerks' effects processes a live action Roy Rogers, his band, an audience and even his horse Trigger are inserted into an animated moonlit prairie. On one hand this may be an effort to accommodate the audiences' desire to see Rogers - the only film star of the bunch - on screen and with his horse, but the placement of his appearance in an animated segment and at the end of the film is a phenomenal climax which is very effective when placed in the whole of the film. The audience is furthermore placed at a remove through the use of at least three bookending techniques; Roy Rogers, displaced famous film star, tells a tale to another audience, which we become, placed as a segment in a larger film, which is introduced to us as such.

Pecos Bill, as told by Rogers, is one of the best paced 23 minutes in Disney's animated output, but its' presentation outside of Melody Time compromises the mastery of the short. The narrator announces at the start of the short that we best "sashay on in" slowly, and what follows is a brilliantly sedate section with all the poetry missing from the bulk of the rest of the film. "Blue Shadows on the Trail", a lengthy segment of an extended pastorale of a western landscape at dusk, is structured essentially like a Silly Symphony, complete with extended use of the Multiplane, animal humor, and the gentle touch of a lullaby soundtrack. We then find Roy Rogers and company out in the west, convincingly throwing "blue shadows" across the watercolor landscape, and a dialouge scene ensues. When Pecos Bill is brought up the dialouge subtly shifts to rhyming verse, which begins an extended buildup to the start of the Pecos Bill number proper.

As the flat verse enters, so to does the element of song, as Rogers' band, the Sons of the Pioneers, increasingly frequently begin to interject with the three primary songs that comprise the Pecos Bill short: Pecos Bill's ballad, Slue Foot Sue's theme, and the love theme. When the animation begins, it is because Rogers draws a map of the United States in the sand, literally the first drawing in the sequence which creates the animation illusion. The authorial hand, established at the start of the short with the animator's brush, is now transferred to Rogers, who will tell the tale and thus grants the film's segue back to animation. As Rogers' animated film continues, so does the meter of the Sons of the Pioneers' verse increase, until, when Pecos is at full maturity, a real song begins. Pecos Bill himself begins the song by riding into his own closeup and, in an annotation of Edwin S. Porter, fires point blank at the audience.

Transferring the Authorial Hand

Pecos Bill was quite a cowboy down in Texas
And the western superman, to say the least
He was the roughest, toughest, critter
Never known to be a quitter
'Cause he never had no fear of man nor beast
So yippie yi-yay, yi-yay, yippie yi-yow
For the toughest critter West of the Alamo

What makes this segment so remarkable is it's relentless pace, aggressive color and constant visual invention. Not content to merley visualize the ballad, Disney animators present a succession of gag which go well beyond the typical Disney"case of the cutes" best exemplified by the Silly Symphonies, ie, the mode of the "Blue Shadows" segment. Now, the humor comes so quickly that Pecos actually establishes his mastery of his Western locale by doing something which never happens in a Disney short - he violates the space of the motion picture film frame, reacting to events in shots which have not yet been projected. In one instance, he reels bandits in from the next shot using a cartoon winch, which forces the screen to wipe as they enter. In another, he shoots the background around him away until he obliterates the shot he's in, signaling the change to the next. The audience is further blocked from embracing the narrative through the animator's constant shifting of the performers of the music in and out of diagetic elements of the frame: a voice heard on the soundtrack may emanate from Bill, his horse, a cow, a bystander, an object, or anything else. It's a simple and simply funny joke, but it frames the entire enterprise as the tallest of tall tales and continues the authorial power given to Rogers. And while Rogers and Company speak for everyone else, Slue Foot Sue and Pecos Bill never speak, and are granted the power Ford assigned to John Wayne in his westerns. After all, they are too legendary to actually be heard.

Pecos Bill: Breaking cinematic space

As the segment reaches its' effective end, so does the film, but not without a reprise of "Blue Shadows". While before, the camera tracked left to right and right to left to find Rogers, now it pulls out into a balanced composition. Rogers' song ends, his tale ends, and the musical progression of the piece folds backwards on itself as "Blue Shadows" carries the audience out of the segment the same way they entered: slowly, somberly. The bookending structures are repeated entering and leaving the piece, creating closure which otherwise doesn't exist in television versions which cut the Roy Rogers segment. Just like the music that inspired it, the short follows the inherent unities of the musical suite, the pleasures it provides, rather than those unities which are primarily dramatic. Pecos enters this world and leaves it as a savage among the coyotes and if we feel bad for him at all it is because of the metrical progression of music and image. Bill remains silent.

The Legend of Johnny Appleseed

The best shorts of the Post-Fantasias are those not encumbered with a complex narrative or a variety of tones; they tell stories simply and quickly, reach their emotional climaxes effectively, and get out the door at the right moment, not required by the traditional three act narrative structure to hang around when they're not wanted.

"Johnny Appleseed' is probably the best thing either Melody Time or Make Mine Music has going for it, because it's disarmingly unpretentious. The best cultural artifacts in the Americana mold have to walk a careful line between becoming self consciously important and remaining innocent, but the Disney animators make it seem like second nature. Americana, in its' oldest and purest form, relies heavily on a larger context whereby the creation of the law, the nobility of the commonwealth and especially the westward expansion are sanctified by God, or a similarly pure cultural figure such as Abraham Lincoln. In general style many of these folk tales are similar to those told in Medieval Europe, where the Devil is constantly being outwitted by the clever blacksmith or tradesperson.


The shorts' innocent atmosphere is furthermore conveyed through the animation backgrounds painted in the style of Mary Blair. Blair intentionally skews the perspective in all the wrong directions and reduces the depth of the paintings to almost nothing; everything is stacked right up on top of one another like a Medieval fresco. The style of the backgrounds, simple and geometric in design but richly textured, recall American folk art. And Dennis Day's boyish, clean cut voice as the voice of all the characters in the short including the narrator lends the appropriate air of a simple American fable. The show hits all the right notes.

Disney's Johnny Appleseed has the unenviable task of juggling this overt, traditional metaphor with the structure of an animated short which must be as direct and light handed as possible, and it unsurprisingly does it with a little song. Although it's a well known trope of Disney's to use a song to introduce a character's motivations (I'm Wishing, A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes, Once Upon A Dream, etc). Johnny's theme is a whistled, catchy little ditty which is one of Disney's simplest and one of their least labored.

The Lord is good to me
And so I thank the Lord
For giving me the things I need
The sun and rain and the apple seed
He's been good to me;

I owe the Lord so much
For everything I see,
I'm certain if it weren't for Him
There'd be no apples on this limb
He's been good to me;

I wake up every day
As happy as can be
Because I know that with His care
My apple trees - they will still be there!
Oh the Lord is good to me!

We hear this memorable little tune only three times in the short, and each time the whistled bridges between the verses catch the ear of the listener in a way the rest of the songs in the short are not designed to do. The other songs in "Johnny Appleseed" are by and large more traditional "folk" music: the march of "Get On The Wagon", the squaredance of the pioneers at the fall festival, and the rapid meter of "There's A Lot of Work To Do" - the song Johnny's angel uses to motivate him to enter the frontier - are more forgettable. They contain the aggressive meter of marches, forward driving, manifest destiny. "The Lord Is Good to Me" is less a hymn and more a song in the mold of "Whistle While You Work" - a small personal expression by a small man with a big story.

The second time we hear "The Lord Is Good To Me", it is just after Johnny has established his harmony with nature (by extension, God). He heads off into the wilderness whistling his little ditty, but before we can fully enjoy it again he's vanished from sight and the whistling becomes haunting and distant. In auditory terms, we are losing Johnny as he passes into history, and each time we see Johnny henceforth he will have aged significantly, although it is the young man from the opening scenes we still think of. The third reprise of "The Lord Is Good To Me" is by a heavenly chorus after his death, when he leaves to plant the apple blossoms in the beyond we see as clouds from earth:

And someday there'll be apples there
For everyone in the world to share;
The Lord is good to me!

It's the last moment in the short and, backed by beautiful images where the orchard of his place of death becomes billowing clouds and sunbeams, it's very moving. But the effect has been achieved through establishing a likeable song and character, delaying the return of the song, and finally bringing it back as an ethereal echo. The Lord is good to me, indeed. Yet we never once are required to subscribe to Johnny's beliefs: the short is the only one in Melody Time to begin with a book opening and as such has, when combined with Dennis Day's bright youthful vocals, the character of a national fable. As in Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster, the religious theme is fairly submerged in the patriotic theme, and they keep each other in check, allowing a degree of universality to enter.

What Disney has actually accomplished here is one of the hardest things a tale about a national character has to succeed in: the passing into history. We get to know Johnny directly and his faith and hope is so carefully judged and presented with such beautiful rural simplicity it's impossible to doubt. His little song does all the legwork of the short and the rest of the piece bides its' time cashing in on what the musical piece accomplishes as Johnny's good deeds pay off. Consider the other viable route open to storytellers: Johnny is immediately established as an major character who will accomplish great things. Far more engaging is the minor character who does accomplish great things. It's the myth of America.

"The Legend of Johnny Appleseed", then, is one of Disney's most potent original-source mythologies: the studio head, the most quintessentially American man of his century along with Will Rogers, who so often would earmark Europe's cultural tales for his own expressions, created remarkably few masterpieces about America. Lady and the Tramp for sure, perhaps Summer Magic. Definitely The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. And definitely The Legend of Johnny Appleseed, the light half to that dark tale of American ambition penned by Washington Irving.

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Next week: Saludos Amigos

Disney's New Spectatorship: Introduction

A good (or at least traditional) starting place when approaching the Disney animated feature films is to begin by classifying the different periods. After all, isn't it easier to compare the relative triumphs of different films if they're all nicely sorted into little bundles? The problem is that, especially when Walt was really monitoring the animation output of the studio, this isn't so easy. The pair of Snow White and Pinocchio are aesthetically matched through the watercolor designs of Gustaf Tenggren and their modernistic adaptations of European mythical antiquity. Cinderella through Lady and the Tramp could be called "reclaiming lost ground", moving into an increasingly realistic, pared down aesthetic. Then we enter the Wolfgang Reitherman / XEROX period from 101 Dalmatians through The Rescuers, etc.

These are rarely clean breaks, with the highly stylized and effective Sleeping Beauty perched right between the stylistically quite inert early 50's period and the increasingly lazy XEROX period. Then, of course, there is Fantasia, belonging more to the 1943 - 1949 "Compilation Period" but separated from that chunk of Disney history by the quite aesthetically diverse Dumbo and Bambi.

I don't claim to be an expert on those films or much of the animation output by Disney, but one period does strike my fancy: the 1943 - 1946 Compilation Period, comprising two compact miniature movements: the Latin America films and the Post-Fantasias. There are also two double feature films, Fun and Fancy Free and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, each comprising two 30-odd minute short films. These films are remarkable for doing all that Disney wouldn't allow his animation department to do following Snow White: being manic, chaotic, aesthetically innovative, sexual, vibrant and sometimes really really funny. I'll take a dozen Saludos Amigos over any one Peter Pan.

What makes these films so remarkable is that they don't shy away from being cartoons: while Disney was intentionally trying to hedge animation away from the thing it's best at (not representing reality) into an area more like moving fine art, receipts just weren't paying off and eventually, the studio was about to collapse after numerous debacles like Fantasia. Then the military took over the studio and, seemingly while Walt Disney was off somewhere worrying about strikes and such, what was left of the animation department quietly began to turn out some really unusual material.

What is amazing about these films is that they use animation is a very aggressive way to inform even the traditional cutting continuity of the Hollywood style they're based on. Animation has always been perched on a strange precipice, where things are obviously phony but always reaching towards realism; it is the current conundrum of CGI animation today. The people who best exploited the "fake realism" animation offers was the Fleisher Brothers Studios. When they rotoscoped over Cab Calloway for their brilliant short Minnie the Moocher, they first showed you a long unedited take of Cab and his band performing the song before the cartoon even started, forcing you to recognize that when Cab Calloway appears in the cartoon later as a ghost walrus, that his movements have indeed been traced over, and that he is furthermore not a character in the diagesis of the story but just Cab Calloway as a ghost walrus.

In another Fleisher short, I'll Be Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You, performed by Louis Armstrong, the Armstrong band is established playing at the start of the short as in Minnie the Moocher, but are later revealed to be playing behind the movie screen in the theater when the on-screen cartoon disrupts the screen and it rolls up like a windowshade.

These kinds of very aggressive filmic choices, along with those made in the Disney package films and in a certain limited number of live action films, create a new kind of spectatorship. No longer is the illusion of a world existing on screen maintained, but repeatedly and aggressively we are exposed to stylistic and conceptual intrusions which alienate the viewer from the film in a way which forces them to accept the film as not a narrative, but a series of choices performed by a conscious craftsperson for their benefit.

The stylistic mode of Hollywood which evolved more or less accidentally is no more intrinsically valid than any other cinematic mode of representation; it's just the one whose compositions, patterns, and basic structures took power and held power. Much like any other language, literal or figurative, viewers are exposed to one way of doing or saying things until only that mode is truly comprehensible. In film studies we thus call the Hollywood-Griffith-Porter school of cutting continuity the Institutionalized Mode of Representation. Filmmaker Peter Watkins, who brilliantly used the style of news reports and news reels to fictionalize the nuclear attack on Great Britain in The War Game, takes the phrase one step further and calls in the "IMR" the Monoform, to make transparent the stifling artistic sameness of much of our modern media.

Although it's pretty hard to make the converse argument that the Disney films (or any film created with mass appeal in mind) are honestly, diametrically opposed avant-garde experiences, I think a middle ground does exist, where the viewer is allowed the narrative-style pleasure experience as well as a conscious artist, "New Spectatorship" kind of experience. Micheal Powell, who directed some of the best of the authentically artistic narrative films, called this the "Composed Film", specifically referring to his aesthetically dazzling The Tales of Hoffman, which does everything you can do in films in one two hour film opera. This idea of the "Composed Film", of a film where the audience is made aware of choices made by a filmmaker through very brauvera movements and moments, might be identified as the alternative to the "Imposed Film" - the Hollywood style where all distractions are minimized.


Moreover, if we subscribe to this idea of a composed film we can drag in a surprisingly diverse number of sources - Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and countless others have sought this "Composed Film" aesthetic to very different ends throughout film history. Many have expressed their admiration for the efforts of Walt Disney, maker of the most extreme "Composed Films" in history, where every moment must, by definition, be a choice. This legacy is apparent from Reinhardt's Midsummer being a conceptual predecessor to Fantasia and through to Powell and Pressburger's Hoffman being a clear continuation of its' ideas.

This "Composed Film" is most acceptable to a mainstream movie audience in small doses, mainly short films where such ideas can be expressed in moments of singularity. And the Disney package film are composed entirely of short films, usually focused on a singularity of purpose. Rather than being based on question of narrative resolution, they are structured on things like color, meter, music, or rhythm. The narrative is usually of little importance and is, in fact, something of a non-diagetic component in the larger film.

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Next Week: Melody Time