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Walt Disney Art Classics - The Three Caballeros - Three Happy Chappies
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The Story
All-American Donald Duck exchanges his usual sailor hat for a sombrero as he struts his stuff with Latin American pals, Brazilian parrot Jose Carioca and Mexican rooster Panchito, celebrating their camaraderie as "happy amigos."
The Artwork
This limited-edition sericel portrays scene 19 from Sequence 1 of The Three Caballeros (1945). Celebrating its 60th anniversary, The Three Caballeros was the second feature produced as a result of Walt Disney's trip to South America undertaken at the request of the U.S. government as part of its World War II "Good Neighbor" Policy. Donald Duck was so wildly loved in the 1940s (his popularity had surpassed even that of Mickey Mouse) that he was the first and only choice to play the American
tourist who is given a deluxe tour of South America by his Latin compadres, Jose and Panchito. Naturally, the trio's biggest moment came in their exuberant performance of the title song, animated by the most freewheeling of Walt Disney's "Nine Old Men," Ward Kimball. "I sat and I listened to the record off and on for about a week," Ward remembered. "Finally, I said I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to be literal about the presentation. If they mention serapes, all of a sudden there'll be serapes. When they sing, "We're birds of a feather", they'll all start flying around." Ward also experimented with "breaking the rather conservative rules of animation. For instance, if a character
goes out on the right, he should come back in on the right, and I had them going out on the right and coming back in on the left, or coming down from the top of the screen." Though the sequence director was concerned about Walt Disney's reaction to the unconventional sequence and planned on alterations, Walt loved Ward's sharp timing and comic dazzling invention, and insisted that the scene remain exactly as Kimball had animated it.
This artwork was created using the fine art technique of color reproduction known as serigraphy. Artists at the Walt Disney Studios Ink and Paint Department specially created a hand-inked, hand-painted animation cel which was used as reference in the production of these sericels. Eighteen colors were used to recreate the color image, each of which has been exactingly screen-printed, one color at a time, onto the acetate cel. Included as plussing with this edition, each mat is enhanced with a South American-inspired border design and a remarque of The Three Caballeros logo.
The result is one of the most explosively funny sequences in Disney animation history, and a festive 60th anniversary portrait of those three happy chappies.
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