Saludos Amigos
Saludos Amigos (Hello, Friends in English, Olá, Amigos in Portuguese) is a 1942 animated feature package film produced by Walt Disney and released by RKO Radio Pictures. It is the sixth animated feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series. It is the first of six package films made by the Disney studio in the 1940s. Set in Latin America, it is made up of four different segments; Donald Duck stars in two of them and Goofy stars in one. It also features the first appearance of José Carioca, the Brazilian parrot. Saludos Amigos was popular enough that Walt Disney decided to make another film about Latin America, The Three Caballeros, to be produced two years later. Saludos Amigos premiered in Rio de Janeiro on August 24, 1942. It was released in the United States on February 6, 1943. It garnered mixed reviews and was only reissued once, in 1949, when it was shown on a double bill with the first reissue of Dumbo.
In early 1941, before U.S. entry into World War II, the United States Department of State commissioned a Disney goodwill tour of South America, intended to lead to a movie to be shown in the US, Central, and South America as part of the Good Neighbor Policy. Disney was chosen for this because several Latin American governments had close ties with Nazi Germany,[1] and the US government wanted to counteract those ties. Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters were popular in Latin America, and Walt Disney acted as ambassador. The tour, facilitated by Nelson Rockefeller, who had recently been appointed as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), took Disney and a group of roughly twenty composers, artists, technicians, etc. from his studio to South America, mainly to Brazil and Argentina, but also to Chile and Peru.
The film itself was given federal loan guarantees. These were necessary because the Disney studio had over-expanded just before European markets were closed to them by the war, and because Disney was struggling with labor unrest at the time (including a strike that was underway at the time the goodwill journey began).
The film included live-action documentary sequences featuring footage of modern Latin American cities with skyscrapers and fashionably dressed residents. This surprised many contemporary US viewers, who associated such images only with US and European cities, and contributed to a changing impression of Latin America. Film historian Alfred Charles Richard Jr. has commented that Saludo Amigos "did more to cement a community of interest between peoples of the Americas in a few months than the State Department had in fifty years".
Directed by Norman Ferguson
Wilfred Jackson
Jack Kinney
Hamilton Luske
William Roberts
Produced by Walt Disney
Written by Homer Brightman
William Cottrell
Richard Huemer
Joseph Grant
Harold Reeves
Ted Sears
Webb Smith
Roy Williams
Ralph Wright
Narrated by Fred Shields
Starring Lee Blair
Mary Blair
Pinto Colvig
Walt Disney
Norman Ferguson
Frank Graham
Clarence Nash
José Oliviera
Frank Thomas
Studio Walt Disney Productions
Distributed by RKO Radio Pictures
Release date(s)
August 24, 1942 (Rio de Janeiro)
February 6, 1943 (United States)
Running time 42 minutes
Country United States
Language English, Portuguese
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