Saludos Amigos (1942)
Today we return to the package films, beginning with Saludos Amigos. The Movie: Saludos Amigos is the 6th film in the Disney Animated Canon and the first of the Package Film Era. At only 42 minutes, it is the shortest film in the canon, barely qualifying as a feature film (by definition over 40 minutes). In early 1941, Disney was in financial trouble, with Pinocchio and Fantasia underperforming at the box-office, partially due to the outbreak of WWII in Europe. The US Government, as part of the Good Neighbor Policy, commissioned Walt Disney and a group of artists to travel to South America to make a movie, hoping to foster better relations with those nations, several of which had close ties to Germany. The resulting film was Saludos Amigos, which debuted in Rio de Janeiro in 1942 and the US in 1943. The film did garner three Oscar nominations, one for sound and two for music. Saludos Amigos, like many of the package films, contains a mix of animati...