With the State snow firmly entrenched in World War II and many of its animators conscripted, their European markets closed, and the lingering effects of the animators strike of 1941, Disney were forced to scale back on their ambitions, producing barely feature length animation and live action hybrids like Saludos Amigos. At just 42 minutes it barely even qualifies as a feature.

It’s not just an animation/live action hybrid but a mix of travelogue and anthology film. The Disney animators, seen in dull live-action inserts, shot without synchronised sound and relying on a dry voice over to keep thinks trudging along (it could all have been stock footage for all we know) head south of the border for a grand tour of South America supposedly looking for inspiration. In fact there was a political imperative behind the making of the film – Walt Disney had been approached by the Department of State to make the tour as part of their Good Neighbor Policy, the US government fearing that some South American countries had links to or sympathies with Nazi Germany.

Around 20 staff members embarked on the journey and when they got home, they made the four short stories that make up the film. For the first, they “recruited” one of the company’s biggest stars, Donald Duck, for an eponymous slapstick tour of Lake Titicaca in the Andes. The vignette takes half-hearted satirical swipes at the behaviour of American tourists abroad but as with so many Donald Duck tales, it’s too slapstick and Donald too abrasive for it to be much fun.

Pedro was a freshly minted characters, a plucky anthropomorphic mail plane from Santiago, Chile that owes something to the persistent steam engine of Dumbo (1941). He battles a storm to make his first delivery but it’s not as exciting as it sounds, and it turns into a rather lightweight and charmless short that Disney liked enough to issue as a separate theatrical short in 1955.

El Gaucho Goofy is just as dull, featuring another of Disney’s less impressive characters. Goofy “plays” an American cowboy transplanted to the Argentine pampas to learn from the local gauchos, but he finds it to be too much hard work, thanks mainly to a prankster horse. He’s eventually returned to Texas with a better understanding of the life of his Argentine compatriots.

It all ends in much better style with Aquarela do Brasil, a lovely abstract piece more in the vein of Fantasia (1940) than the more traditional animation of the other stories. Donald Duck is back but even his ill-tempered bad behaviour can’t wipe the shine of this marvellous little tale. It introduced the world to the upbeat parrot Jose de Cariaco who would return in a follow-up film, The Three Caballeros (1944), who guides Donald out of the jungle and into the bright lights of Rio de Janeiro where they dance the night away. Finally, at the last knockings, Saludos Amigos springs into life, but there’s a lot of so-so material to struggle through to get there.

It’s tempting to suggest that Saludos Amigos doesn’t really do South America justice at all. It only visits a few countries, has a very dubious view of the people it meets and viewers don’t come away with any real sense of what the countries are really like. But it had the effect of surprising some American viewers with its live-action views of various South American cities as comparable to their American counterparts. The film, which was nominated for three Oscars (Best Musical Score, Best Original Song (Saludos Amigos) and Best Sound Recording) has been credited in some quarters with boosting tourist economies in South America after Americans saw the film and started planning holidays to see more. In that sense it has to rate as one of Disney’s most successful films, though stacked against the far better proper features (it accompanied one of them, Dumbo on its initial theatrical run) it looks a bit dull and unfocused.

As well as all the woes mentioned earlier, Disney was having to deal with the uncomfortable truth that, no matter how good they were and no matter how much we love them today, their early experiments in feature-length animation, particularly Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia and Bambi (1942) hadn’t performed as well at the box office as they’d hoped. The company would spend the rest of the 1940s making these shorter length and/or multi-part films like Victory Through Air Power (1943), The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music (1946), Fun and Fancy Free (1947), Melody Time (1948) and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad (1949). Only the live-action/animation hybrids Song of the South (1946) (which would become one of the company’s most controversial releases) and So Dear to My Heart (1948) broke the mould.