IN the summer of 1941, just before the US en tered World War II, Walt Disney and a large group of his artists took an extensive tour of South America sponsored by the US government.
Uncle Sam hoped Walt’s cultural mission would counteract growing Nazi influence in the region. With the feds guaranteeing profits from the two features resulting from the trip, Walt saw it as a way to save his foundering studio, then beset by labor and financial problems.
Even though this documentary was sponsored by the Walt Disney Family Foundation, produced by one of Walt’s grandkids and directed by the son of a Disney animator who was on the trip, it’s still a little surprising “Walt & El Grupo” seems far more interested in how this trip affected the fate of the studio rather than the Free World.
Despite an overly generous running time, there is little political context, and no mention at all of Nelson Rockefeller, who organized pricey government-sponsored junkets like this for the Office of Inter-American Affairs.
Rockefeller’s family was a major investor in Disney’s distributor, RKO, which sent Orson Welles to South America at around the same time to make the abortive “It’s All True,” which ultimately inspired a far better documentary.
What we get here are endless, repetitive stories told by and letters read by the children of the Disney junketeers — all of them apparently dead — and not a whole lot of perspective on Disney himself.
There is surprisingly little footage from the first of the two features that resulted from the trip — the disappointingly stereotyped “Saludos Amigos” — and none at all from its far superior sequel, “The Three Caballeros” (1944).
What we get, along with laborious matching present-day footage of South America, are extensive excerpts from the color documentary short “South of the Border With Disney” (1943).
“Walt & El Grupo,” a disappointingly superficial treatment of a fascinating historical incident, will likely turn up on the next edition.