It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Disney's 7th animated feature film combines animation and live action in a movie which purports to be a travelogue of Latin America in which Donald Duck sees the world, makes a couple of feathered friends, and lusts after a variety of comely young human women.There are a number of different sequences in the film, some musical and some not and, to be frank, not only do they not all fit well, they aren't all up to Disney's usual standard. The penguin sequence is out of place, and much of the central musical sequence, while highly imaginative, is overlong and lacks the discipline which benefited the later Pink Elephants sequence in Dumbo, for instance. And the animation itself isn't always as good as one would expect.And then we have the title song, about three quarters of the way through, in which it all comes gloriously together. Jam packed full of gags, musically full of joy, lyrically clever and witty, and furiously and surrealistically animated, it is a sequence of genius.If only the rest of the film had been as good.

Walt Disney's outreach to the South American market resulted in a couple of films--SALUDOS AMIGOS was the first, and THE THREE CABALLEROS came next. To make a comparison, I'd have to see "SA" again, but I do recall that it had some charming musical sequences.The same is true of THE THREE CABALLEROS, especially when the musical score includes the title song (delightully done by Panchito, Jose Carioca and Donald Duck), and repeated throughout, and ballads such as YOU BELONG TO MY HEART and HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO BAIA? All of them are performed with some fantastic art work and animation combining live action and cartoon characters.The last fifteen minutes seems to be scrambling for a way to keep the viewer's attention with some explosive fireworks and a dazzling display of surrealism, minus any conception of a way to end the movie on a high note. The film itself is uneven, offering typical Disney animation for the flying donkey sequence and then resorting to over-the-top fireworks that outdo the Pink Elephants number from DUMBO. But it's hard to resist the bouncy South American flavor of the score and the charming characterizations of Donald, Panchito and Jose Carioca. The stylized conception of a Mexican Christmas by artist Mary Blair is a standout among the art work involved here, although later the piñata sequence is a bit overwhelming in effects.The dazzling color and the music make it worth watching at least once, although it's hard to make a comparison between this and other Disney full-length features. Some of the action is fast and furious but the sort of thing that will appeal to very young children.Summing up: You will either love it or hate it, but if you're a Disney fan you should see it at least once.

this is good neighbor PR to Latin America? if i was from another country and viewed this as a public relations machine i would be disturbed. i would probably think Americans and the Disney people were drinking or doing drugs or had just plain lost it. whatever, as a PR machine i just wouldn't get it.as a mind blowingly weird cartoon i understand this. it's lunacy just seems thinly disguised as a travelogue of South America. not that the depictions of South America aren't informing or often charming and musical, the overall effect just seems to make South America seem more like 'Oz' or 'Wonderland' or something. even though a lot of the information is authentic, it makes South America come off like a fantasy or fairy tale rather than something real. and it does have a tendency to make Latin Americans come off as characters in a Disney cartoon rather than real people. especially in the bathing beauty beach scene with Pato Donald.i'm not saying a lot of this isn't the usual Disney cuteness and adorability, a lot of it is. the scene where Pato Donald does a little jitterbug at a outdoor BBQ is precious cute. it's just that when 'Caballeros' gets weird, it fries hard and acidicly. like hard core acid. most of it's visuals and humour are sharp, hot headed and bitingly caustic. although hilariously funny, it sort of leaves the viewer with a sort of a hangover and a disturbed state of mind.i don't think any of this is stereotypical or racist at all. in fact the film is very reverent of South America and it's culture. rather than working as propaganda for the United States, it has a reverse effect of being propaganda for South America instead. the only problem is, having been made mostly by Anglos, i'm not sure a lot of Latinos might feel comfortable being portrayed as larger than life fantasy characters out of a Disney toon. and this does have a bad tendency to portray Latinos as "cute" and doing "cute" things like singing about cookies and doing dances with children. however there is one tough gritty moment with a traditional cock fight. cock fighting here is illegal.as sharp and acerbic as 'Caballeros' gets, it's still very cute and funny and cinematically one of Disney's best works of hand drawn animation. it just sort of makes South America seem like it only exist in fairy tales or something.

"The Three Caballeros" is one of the most unusual of oddities in the Disney animated canon. It's arguably the package feature which requires to be seen altogether the most (that is not to say that these such films deserve to go cut up and remain only viewed as separate short subjects and featurettes; it's just that they could and have easily been viewed as separate things). Regardless, it still doesn't have much of a plot. Donald Duck receives a whole load of birthday presents from his friends in Latin America, the first of which he opens being a film reel exhibiting short subjects concerning Latin American themes and stories. However, the film soon deviates as Donald's eccentric friends Jose Carioca (a parrot from Brazil) and Panchito (a rooster from Mexico) arrive and via the use of some magic gifts transport Donald to their respective countries, where live-action actors and animated settings and beings interact. In my opinion, the second and third acts of the film (the first act being the assorted short films) cannot really be viewed out of context, so in some ways, the film walks the line between single story feature (such as "Snow White", "Pinocchio", "Dumbo" etc) and package feature.For those who don't know much about the context in which the film was made (I suspect that most people who are visiting this page, however, are animation buffs who will know a bit about this film), "The Three Caballeros" was, like the earlier "Saludos Amigos" (a similarly unusual entry in Disney's library of animated features), a by-product of the American government pressuring Disney to create films based around Latin American themes in order for the USA to woo neutral South America during the Second World War away from anything Axis, and respectively also make Yankees appreciate all things South of the Border. There are hints to the propaganda purposes (such as the general "OMG, aren't Mexico and Brazil so cool?" tone as well as the birds of South America being dubbed "Donald's cousins"), but overall, the film doesn't seem too dated, or as much as everyone says it has."The Three Caballeros" is actually rather surreal. I honestly believe that such a far-out film would never get made today by such a prominent studio. It's the trippiest of Disney's animated classics easily. "Alice in Wonderland", as everybody jokes, is a bit of an LSD-fest in places, but its storybook roots keep it from seeming like the result of drinking something from a bottle marked "DRINK ME". And the high-brow spirit of "Fantasia" and its Rackham-esquire look has always prevented me from labelling it as truly trippy. Much of "The Three Caballeros", however, is so crazy that I wondered if I'd taken something by accident. The main background throughout the film is vague, changing colour to suit the mood of the scene, and the animation has no limits most of the time (for example, inanimate objects and things come to life like random, the laws of physics are disobeyed very much so and characters morph and multiply at the drop of a hat). There's even some early experiments with mixing animation and live action thrown in. Some of it is kinda lame - Aurora Miranda, playing a Brazilian cake seller, looks like she's simply walking in front of a screen where footage of Donald Duck is playing - however, some effects are quite good, such as animated cockerels morphing into live men.Overall, "The Three Caballeros" is a good film. Admittedly, the first act doesn't match the second and third act very well (it actually seems like left-overs from the tamer sister-film "Saludos Amigos", and some of the surrealism gets a bit too baffling to watch (the final ten minutes or so is an example of this sort). And not knowing any Portuguese, Jose Carioca can be difficult to understand, as he often spurts out the odd word or phrase in his native language. Yet the film is most certainly still worth watching, and makes for quite an underrated piece. Also recommended is "Blame it on the Samba" from 1948's "Melody Time". Whilst generally quite a dull package film, that segment is excellent. I believe that it was planned for "The Three Caballeros", though didn't surface until a few years later.