A couple weeks ago, I rented Waking Sleeping Beauty,
a documentary about the exciting period in Disney history that largely
lined up with my own childhood and included such classics as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. On that DVD were previews for two other Disney documentaries. I was very interested in The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story, so that went into my queue next. However, when I saw that Walt and El Grupo,
which deals with the time during the 1940s when Walt Disney and several
of his employees went to South America on a goodwill tour / research
trip, would soon be available on Live Streaming Video, I decided to go
that route and not worry about the DVD Special Features. As I suspected,
while this was still an interesting peek into Disney history, it didn’t
keep me as riveted as the others.
Walt and El Grupo was
written and directed by Theodore Thomas, son of famed Disney animator
Frank Thomas, one of the few people spotlighted in the movie who was
familiar to me. Another was artist Mary Blair, known, among other
things, for her work on Disneyland attraction it’s a small world. As for
everybody else, I was chagrined to realize that I recognized nearly no
names that were tossed out throughout the documentary, which made it a
little hard to connect with at times, especially since roughly half of
the interviewees did not speak English, and at times, the subtitles were
pretty hard to read against light backgrounds.
But boy, did we
get a lot of Walt, and that was the best part of the movie for me. There
were clips of interviews with Walt Disney, videos and photographs of
him embracing the cultures of the various cities he visited with his
crew, and especially lots of people reminiscing about their memories of
him and what a stir he caused everywhere he went. He was only about 40
during this trip, and despite the unfortunate circumstances that partly
precipitated it – an animators’ strike that halted work at the studio –
he seems to have embraced the journey with gusto, and it was a joy to
listen to stories of his interaction with the locals at every leg of the
voyage.
There are a lot of talking heads in this movie, and I
often found it hard to keep track of who was who, especially among the
South Americans. It didn’t help that many of the interview subjects were
spouses or children or grandchildren. I often forgot which interviewee
went with which member of “el grupo,” the general name used for the
group of people who went with Walt Disney on that trip. There was also a
fair bit video depicting scenery and culture, but these parts tended to
be in rather extended sequences that went on a little too long. I think
there could have been a better balance of interviews to travelogue-type
scenes.
Aside from the parts about Disney himself, what I found most interesting were the discussions on Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros,
the two movies that came out of this venture. The documentary includes
several clips from both, certainly enough to whet the appetite of anyone
who hasn’t seen those movies. As Disney features go, they’re a little
unusual, but I still enjoy them, and it’s neat to get some background on
them.
Of the three Disney documentaries I’ve watched this month, Walt and El Grupo
was the one that felt the most like a documentary to me. It never
really pulled me out of that mindset, largely because it was primarily
about an experience rather than specific people. I was able to latch
onto Walt Disney to a certain extent, but since so much of that was
second-hand, it still didn’t feel that immediate. I certainly recommend
the movie to anyone interested in Disney history, but this isn’t one
I’ll feel compelled to add to my collection.
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