AA S FOR HELLO, FRIENDS, “it was made quickly and in very difficult conditions. Even so it’s a living and very honest piece of work. The second film that came out of the trip, The three caballeros, is technically better and introduces effects like the combination of animation and real people. This was applied better in later films such as Mary Poppins. The influence of the trip to Latin America lasted for at least two decades”. I In the documentary we see a 39 year old Walt Disney on top form. His artists worked at full steam in the rooms of a hotel in Río de Janeiro converted into a studio. They drew, wrote and filled musical scores. They also received Brazilian artists there. Walt’s men, who were known as El Grupo (the Group), walked the streets of Río capturing its essence to put it in their notebooks. They painted beautiful water colours of the bay, and of Sugar Loaf Mountain. They spent hours in night clubs listening to samba, watching the Afro-American people dance. They explored the botanical gardens, filling notebooks with sketches of exotic plants: wild orchids and giant lilies from the Amazon basin. According to Disney, the zoo provided them with a “great amount of material and colour, especially the flamingoes, the ant eaters and the tapirs”. In the short, Watercolor of Brazil, one of the four that make up Hello Friends, we can see all these places converted into cartoons. Disney didn’t miss out on the comic potential of the armadillo:
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“With its heavy armour and its sweet expression it was some find, an ideal buddy for Pluto”. And that is how we see him in the short that the beast co-starred in with the famous hound in 1943. But if there is someone who personifies the deep mark that Brazil left on El Grupo, it is José Carioca. In Hello Friends we see the birth of this character, an elegant and friendly parrot who shows Donald Duck around the streets and cafés of a Rio de Janeiro recreated with impressive vividness. The scene in which Donald offers his hand to his new friend and the latter, on recognizing the famous duck responds with a huge hug, reflects the warmth which Disney felt he was shown in Brazil. In some places the schools were closed to celebrate his arrival. But in South of the Border we also look in on the interminable parade of the Brazilian Army on Independence Day. As the narrator says: “Brazil has not been left behind in this world at war, but is a country prepared for any contingency”. Also, on his arrival in Montevideo, Disney highlights the “great naval battle” that ended with the destruction of the German cruiser, the Admiral Graf Spee. Disney’s journey was not a story of cartoons. Its aim was to win friends for a war.
Disney Gaucho
Walt Disney’s El Grupo lived some intense experiences in Argentina and Chile that were later turned into cartoons. The newscast Sucesos argentinos (Argentinean events) of the era picked up on the event: a smiling Disney drinking mate (tea) and dressed as a cowboy. He exchanged mutual characters with Argentinean artists such as Ramón Columba. In the museum of the caricaturist Severo Vaccaro in Buenos Aires they have some of those drawings. In Hello Friends we sense to what point the Disney characters acted as his alter ego: we see Goofy dressed as a cowboy, drinking mate and enjoying a barbecue. “Fantastic!”, he says on trying a filet steak. On the prairie, the artists took part in the breaking in of wild
horses. They decided to turn it into a drawing full of strength and poetry. And they achieved it brilliantly in the sequence of Hello Friends in which Goofy tries to gallop on his horse.
Flying over the Andes
El Grupo flew on afterwards in a small plane to Santiago in Chile. Crossing the skies of the Andes was for them a dangerous and memorable experience. The artists didn’t put down their pencils during the flight.
ideology . Walt Dis-
ney was a committed patriot and a fervent anti-Communist. During the Second World War he got involved in the struggle with propaganda shorts like Der Fuehrer’s Face and Ducktators. It was precisely there, up in the air, where the plane Pedro was born, another of the characters in Hello Friends. Pedro is a baby aircraft that has to cross the Andes, carrying the mail from Argentina to Chile, exactly the same route as taken by his creators. In the film we
see the same landscapes that they saw, including the 7,000 metres of Aconcagua, which in the cartoons appears as a frightening and furious mountain. This cartoon was made 70 years ago, but a modern viewer still holds his breath when Pedro fights to keep aloft between the mountains. Is that what his creators felt during their journey? Journalist Jaime Huerta explains that during his five days in Chile Disney and El Grupo interviewed the leading artists in the country. Several of them they visited in their studios. The short of Hello Friends, in which Pedro the plane starred, gives a nod to one of them: when in the film the little hero hands over the mail, we discover that it consists of a single letter addressed to Jorge Délano, director of the magazine Topaze and Disney’s host in Santiago. Walt Disney was a committed patriot and a fervent anti-Communist. During the Second World War he got involved in the struggle with propaganda shorts like Der Fuehrer’s Face and Ducktators. Disney and his collaborators, with their immense talent, knew how to pan gold from their latin opportunity. When in Hello Friends Donald Duck suffers altitude sickness at Lake Titicaca, we know that is what happened to the artists. When Goofy sits down to admire the super clear firmament above the prairies, we know that is how they lived it. “We are carrying out an investigation as entertaining as it is instructive”, said Walt Disney himself. Disney, in 1941, was a young man, full of energy. The success of The Seven Dwarfs, Dumbo and Fantasia was still resounding. However, the death of his father caught him out on the journey. And around that time there was also a strike at his studios that affected him profoundly. With the years, Walt Disney turned into a control freak. But theDisney of 1941 shone. He was still capable of dressing up as a cowboy and doing the dances of the prairies. He was a creative sponge at the peak of his splendour. He knew how to turn a journey committed to propaganda into an artistic experience that is still remembered in the museums and archives of Latin America.