Encanto, Disney’s latest animated marvel, has a connection that dates back to World War II and a goodwill trip Walt Disney went on.
Disney’s just-released “Encanto” is the 60th animated feature produced by the studio. To mark the milestone, it features a special version of the “Steamboat Willie”-inspired logo that plays before the movie; the one that starts with the flapping of an animator’s pages and ends with Mickey Mouse, in velvety black-and-white, whistling on the bridge of a steamboat. (If it wasn’t one of the most iconic moments in animation history, that logo, seen before worldwide phenomena like “Frozen” and its sequel, has certainly made it so.) But “Steamboat Willie” and the 60th production are only a part of “Encanto’s” connection to the studio’s past – there’s a much more direct path between it and a journey that Walt Disney took. This isn’t a fairy tale, exactly, but it did take place once upon a time. In 1940, South America was seen as being vulnerable to Nazi influence. A government post was invented called the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, the brainchild of oil heir Nelson Rockefeller (who had keen artistic and business interests in South America), and one of the chief goals was to bolster positive support of South America through film productions released in the United States and abroad. Early efforts, such as sending Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and, um, the Yale Glee Club, had been lackluster. Part of the efforts called for distribution of American films in South American theaters, with grants being provided to American studios that would produce suitably South American content. (Disney was one of those studios.) Distribution and production deals were one thing. But in 1941, they asked Walt Disney to go. Disney normally wouldn’t have taken time away from work to go on a goodwill tour. But ambassadorship sounded good at the time.
