DVD Review: Walt & El Grupo
Theodore Thomas Directs Disney Family Foundation Documentary
Sep 23, 2009 Dominic von Riedemann
In 1941, Walt Disney Studios was perhaps at its lowest point. Both Pinocchio and Fantasia had bombed at the box office, and the animators were on strike, protesting salary inequities at the studio.
Luckily, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was willing to bankroll Disney's next two films – as long as Walt toured South America as part of FDR's Good Neighbor Policy. Increasingly worried about Axis influence in the region, FDR was encouraging Hollywood filmmakers to base their movies in South and Central America, and encourage stars and studio heads to tour the region.
Ted Thomas' innovative new documentary, Walt & El Grupo, remembers Walt Disney's South American trip. Accompanied by his wife Lillian and a select group of employees, Walt not only found the inspiration for Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, but also developed ideas and techniques that would influence the rest of his life.
Ted Thomas Directs Walt & El Grupo, a Documentary About Walt Disney's South American Tour
It's worth noting that Walt & El Grupo avoids the thorny political questions that swirl about the Good Neighbor Tour, preferring to discuss its artistic implications. In that regard, the tour was extremely important for Disney and his animators.
Although his financial and labour troubles likely wouldn't have killed Disney Studios ("Disney had a habit of landing on his feet," says historian J.B. Kaufman), the South American tour did provide Walt with the wherewithal, and artistic inspiration, to continue making movies.
It also helped his employees. The film shows how artist Mary Blair's style radically changed because of the trip. A last-minute addition (partly to mollify her artist husband Lee) the tour changed her from a carbon copy of Lee to an artist with a looser, more impressionistic style, featuring vibrant colours. It served her well: Mary eventually became one of Walt's favourite concept artists, designing characters for 1951's Alice in Wonderland.
The most mind-blowing aspect of Walt & El Grupo is the photo manipulation by visual effects man Bill Russell. Manipulating black & white archival photos in his computer, Russell literally immerses the viewer in Walt's world. However, Thomas is smart enough not to exploit Russell's breakthrough for its own sake, but to use it in the service of the story. Another inspired sequence is when Russell takes those vintage photographs and 'melts' them into modern-day footage of the same scene. Beautifully done.
That said, the movie drags in places, and sometimes has the feel of a vacation slide show: fascinating for the people who greenlit this project, but wearing for those who weren't there.
Don't expect any anti-Disney vitriol in Walt & El Grupo: the most barbed comment in the film is from a Chilean cartoonist who disliked the fact that only Pedro the Plane (from Saludos Amigos) represented his country.
That said, most people in South America were genuinely happy to see Walt and his gang in 1941; anti-American feeling would only really start to kick into gear later, when the U.S. supported military thugs, like Chile's General Pinochet, in order to suppress Communism.
The Final Analysis
While some will dismiss this film as another round of Disney spraining its hand trying to pat itself on the back, Walt & El Grupo is a genuinely innovative documentary that explores an important period in Walt Disney's career and artistic development.
It gets an 7/10.
Walt & El Grupo poster
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