Norm Ferguson (1902–1957)

It would seem to me that the main quality of "The Three Caballeros" is making "Saludos Amigos" look a lot better. It starts out pretty great, with an actually animated framing that actually has some measure of plot (it's Donald's birthday and he's been sent gifts from his Latin-American friends), and a quite solid cartoon of Pablo the Penguin being shown. Then it starts slowly but surely deteriorating, and by the film's halfway point, it's just endless music numbers with either no story at show more all, or one single gag (usually Donald drooling over various girls) dragged out for way, way too long. There are still some minor decent occurrences to be found in there, like the titular song number, but they get fewer and fewer as the film goes on. Finally, the last third of the film is (on purpose) an ever-increasingly nightmarish contentless soup of surrealist animation. Maybe some of it has some artistic merit, but as it has no plot or story relevance, it gets frightfully dull for me very quickly. And I suspect unless you absolutely love stuff like the final few frames of "Alice in Wonderland" or the Pink Elephant Parade in "Dumbo" and wish there was a lot more of this, but done centred around Donald Duck pining for a singing live action woman, you would think the same.
All in all, the film is an amorphous mess despite the (compared to its immediate predecessor) stronger premise and frame story it started out with, and for a compilation movie, it actually only ever shows a single straight-up self-sufficient cartoon (Pablo, in the film's first ten minutes). The rest of just slow-paced Latin-American sightseeing to music, or Donald dancing with or running after live action girls. show less

The live action framing of Disney animators travelling around South America and coming up with the various cartoons shown is a cute concept, but it slows down the film a lot as it doesn't actually have any story or drive to it. The individual cartoons shown, however, are all quite decent by 1940s gag cartoon standards.

Donald Duck learns about Mexico and South America, and suffers a libido-induced psychotic breakdown.

What were the folks at Disney smoking? Did they even bother storyboarding this? And didn't someone sober have to approve it?

Concept: D
Story: D
Characters: D
Dialog: C
Pacing: D
Cinematography: C
Special effects/design: C
Acting: C
Music: B

Enjoyment: C minus

GPA: 1.7/4

oh man, there were a lot of gorgeous scenes here, its impressive to think this was from the 1940's. it really showed what Disney Studios could do with the technology they had at the time.