A couple days ago I came across an ad telling me that Disney+ was having a sale of three months for just 1.99 each (what a bargain!). I’m a sucker for a good deal so I decided to take it. I have to tell you, I was surprised by Disney’s catalog, in a world of streaming services where the selection of each is becoming super narrow, Disney+ actually had many things I wanted to watch (not sponsored).

While looking at my options some priority topics caught my eye. I saw plenty of movies I used to watch when I was a young boy. I started with Atlantis: The Lost Empire, which was quickly followed by its straight-to-video sequel. I then moved to Tarzan, another classic I hadn’t watched in a long time, but from which I still knew most of the songs. I watched a bit of Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers, before moving to one of the most watched movies of my childhood: Saludos Amigos.

The movie poster for Disney's Saludos Amigos in 1942

I had to do a double take, because, apparently, Saludos Amigos was released in 1942, amidst World War II. I was completely oblivious to this fact as I watched it on DVD in 2004 and on Disney+ this year. But I guess that shows that the animation holds up… then again, it might be a remastered version… but I digress.

Rewatching the movie brought back some memories of my childhood. Can I call them memories? I guess some were memories, like taking a backpack full of toys and DVDs to my grandparent’s house, to play and watch while they took care of me. But some are something different in a way that I can’t really explain, so moving on… Just kidding, time for a very niche metaphor that probably won’t explain what I’m trying to say.

I come from a software engineering background, and the best way I can find to describe what I felt is through an analogy with neural networks. Wait… making an analogy between a feeling I had with something that actually tries to simulate some aspects of our brain doesn’t feel that farfetched.

A drawing of a neural network with 3 inputs and 2 outputs

A simple neural network is composed of things called neurons. A neuron receives an input and produces an output (i.e. it activates) based on those inputs¹. Joining several neurons in a complex way (a network), and allowing for their joint activation, lets the network interpret more complex inputs into actionable outputs that make sense. A simple example is a network that receives images and outputs whether it thinks the image contains a cat.

(Almost there)

A curious thing that ends up happening is that subsets of neurons specialize in detecting certain traits of the inputs. For example, a set of neurons can be really good a recognizing the presence of a tail in the image, which together with other traits can point to the conclusion that the image in fact contains a cat. And this is the best analogy I can find for what I felt while watching the movie.

(…what?)

I must’ve watched the movie more than twenty times when I was younger, and watching certain parts of it today fires up the same set of neurons that fired back in 2004. Like some dormant part of my brain that became specialized² in firing at images and sounds of Saludos Amigos, such as Goofy dressed as a gaucho eating some juicy pieces of meat and bread.

Brain is firing, hunger intensifying, send help.

And the truth is I often feel this, that some things make me feel something that I can’t really describe, it isn’t a thought or a memory, it’s a sensation but I can’t link it to any of the five senses.

What you probably don’t know (or by the time you’re reading this maybe you can see it) is that I give subtitles to each of the posts. And if you check the subtitle of this one “How Disney made me wish for an unconnected world.” you’ll conclude that I haven’t even got to the point I wanted to make. The movie’s plot is as follows:

A group of Disney animators fly to South America to learn more about the culture of its countries. The movie starts in the United States, flies to Peru/Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and ends its journey in Brazil. Each of them has a live-action segment followed by an animated one, giving us some insights into their history and customs. Watching them fills me with a sense of adventure and wonder, wishing that I could explore these countries myself, learn from different cultures, and sit back while taking in the unique sceneries and sounds.

Time for a south-american trip.

These were my exact feelings watching the movie all those years back, but this time they were clouded by the sense that, nowadays, traveling like this is no longer possible. Even though the movie is set in the mid-1900s, the communities presented feel untouched, and the people and the places feel alien to my European self. With the advent of ubiquitous traveling, and much more so with the presence of the internet and social media in our lives, I feel like traveling has lost the sense of mystery and wonder. Would the Argentinians depicted be so much different from me nowadays, and wouldn’t I just be a tourist in the middle of hundreds more?

I’m gonna be honest, this argument may be unfounded since I haven’t traveled that much. All of my kilometers have been spent in Western Europe so I can’t be surprised that cultures share many similarities. And you know what? I have to admit that as I wrote this I remembered that I feel many differences between those countries I’ve visited and my own, so maybe the mystery and wonder are still there after all.

This post will end with me raising the white flag. I concede that my points may come from a place of ignorance, and a selfish desire to be unique, to be the tourist and not just a tourist. What’s more, the world may have become more connected, but that doesn’t mean that we’ve all become one and the same, the differences may have just become harder to find. So here is my promise to get to the bottom of this… by traveling some more.

Much like the movie, writing this post has been

…a journey.

Silly pun, I know, but thinking a banger way to finish this post was driving me mad. So lower your expectations.