Disney studios would survive the war years by producing war and training films for the government and executed among other subjects the mobile maps illustrating the progress of wars that included huge probing arrows for their Why We Fight series. Disney's standards of professionalism often led him to subsidize the official budgets. The most significant of these movies was Victory Through Air Power (1943), which hosted animated sequences of significant potency, as when the American eagle battles with a crepuscular Japanese octopus to free the world from its tentacled grip.
The material gathered on Disney's South American tour was made into two features : Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1945). The first of these films running for just forty-three minutes, scarcely merits any feature status, although it contains some remarkable sequences, particularly the concluding 'Acquarela do Brazil' (Watercolor of Brazil), in which an animated paint brush creates a lush jungle background against which an anthropomorphic Brazilian parrot, Jose Carioca, teaches Donald Duck how to dance the samba. This episode heralded even wilder flights of surreal fancy in The Three Caballeros, a hybrid of both real and animated characters. It was this very technique which was later to be used in several other features that included Song of the South (1946), based on Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories about Br'er Rabbit; Mary Poppins (1964) and Pete's Dragon (1978).