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Crossing Borders and Opening Boxes: Disney and Hybrid Animation

In the midst of Disney’s 1945 release The Three Caballeros, we find a close-up of Donald Duck, staring wide-eyed at a pretty Mexican woman, the singer Dora Luz, who is reflected in each of his eyes as a sign of the duck’s enchantment. It is a brief but telling shot in a film that has attracted a range of historical and cultural commentary on the various relationships it suggests, in part because the film here and elsewhere seems to transgress so surprisingly, crossing historical and cultural boundaries. It marks a point, recognized by reviewers of the era, at which Disney animation becomes overtly sexualized, by depicting the duck as a possible suitor for a real, live woman, thus engaging in what Steven Watts terms “libidinous shenanigans” (248) that probably discomfited some expecting the usual Disney family experience. For contemporary critics it also evokes, in its treatment of Luz and other figures in the film, a complex image of American imperialism of the time, or what Julianne Burton-Carvajal terms “an allegory of. . . colonialism par excellence” (142), as Donald acts out America’s all-too-eager courtship of its South American neighbors during World War II. Yet what has seldom been examined is another border crossing that supports these depictions: the aesthetic one built into Donald’s gaze that both parallels and to some extent qualifies these other effects. For the duck’s eyes mix animated and live-action images, offering audiences a hybrid experience that also speaks to the film’s other border crossings in the way it blatantly frames the real as part of a larger cinematic construct. As Foucault’s comment suggests, all such border crossings carry some fallout, invariably have unexpected effects. Whether a literal movement across the South American border, a violation of audience expectations, or the sudden appearance of animated characters in the human world, those transgressions point up a kind of “obstinacy,” an