Clyde Geronimi (1901–1989)

A little girl wanders through a nonsense world.

As a whole, it's a frantic mess. But the individual pieces are great enough to make up for that. It's best seen as a series of shorts instead of a feature.

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

Enjoyment: A plus

GPA: 3.0/4

(Jun. 2012)

The backgrounds/scenes really have a gorgeous 14th century feel to them that complemented the movie quite well. The animation is top-notch and gets 5 stars, but the plot holes in this movie nag at me really hard.

The fairies don't know to make a dress and cake by the time of Aurora/Briar Rose's 16th birthday. But they've been living in the forest, raising Aurora without magic, for 16 years. How the hell did they feed and clothe her in all that time???

Aurora's parents are such dumbshits. I show more mean, without spindles, how were textiles to be spun? (this was actually touched upon in an episode of Happily Ever After, a HBO children's fairy tale cartoon series, it shows that by the time the princess is 16, everyone in the kingdom is wearing patched-up clothes, lol)

How did anyone expect Aurora to not freak out at all the revelations that were dumped on her on her birthday? Heck, the fairies feel bad for her when they see her crying, but they still encourage her to marry the prince because that's what mommy and daddy want. Never mind that after she was born, Aurora was whisked away so she and Phillip did not meet or have the chance to get to know one another until their chance meeting in the forest.

I think this movie has beautiful animation, and some great scenes, but there's quite a bit of datedness here, I know some people are not big fans of the live action remakes of the older Disney movies, but at least the updated version of this movie (Maleficent) gave Maleficent a very good reason for being pissed off at Stephen, in the original movie she just comes across as a silly, petty bitch for not being invited to the baby's christening.

M.M. Strawberry Library & Reviews show less

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

Some of these cartoons -- in particular the excellent "Pecos Bill" -- are quite entertaining, and others have pleasant shades of "Fantasia". But others are frightfully dull, as is the live action narration segment preceding "Pecos Bill". And unlike some of the earlier package films Disney made, this one makes no effort at joining it together with a frame narrative or thematic throughline.