Before Antonio Carlos Jobim, there was Ary Barroso; before Jobim’s classic “Desafinado” and “The Girl from Ipanema,” there were Barroso’s “Brazil” (originally “Aquarela do Brasil”) and “Bahia” (originally “Na Baixa do Sapateiro”). During the war, Barroso’s songs, composed in the late 1930s, launched Brazilian popular music around the world. They were taken up by dozens of jazz and dance bands and pop singers. Yet unlike Jobim’s songs, which took flight after North American jazz musicians discovered them, Barroso’s intricate compositions were imported by an unlikely popularizer, Walt Disney, working at the behest of an even unlikelier master, Nelson Rockefeller — the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs who hoped to weaken the Nazi position in South America with his Good Neighbor policy.

Rockefeller enlisted Disney in 1941 with a guarantee of $150,000 against losses as part of a wide-ranging Hollywood reach-out. He promised Orson Welles twice as much to fly south and shoot a film, but then abandoned him; Welles, whose reputation never recovered, got a modicum of revenge by casting a Rockefeller look-alike as the treacherous nutcase who calls everyone “fella” in “Lady From Shanghai” (1947). Disney, true to form, never had to claim the guarantee. He produced two films that made money: the short compilation “Saludos Amigos,” which made its premiere in Rio in 1942 and in Boston the next year, and the astounding feature film “The Three Caballeros,” which made its premiere in Mexico City toward the close of 1944 and in New York early in 1945.

Disney’s two films enjoyed even greater popularity south of the border than at home, but have never accrued the stature of his other animated classics. Rockefeller’s offer came at a time when Disney was at a creative crossroads. His animated features had not always earned back their costs, and between “Bambi” (1942) and “Cinderella” (1950), he focused on an odd medley of works.

This period might be characterized as the Mary Blair era, after the art director whose unusual color schemes and dramatic watercolor effects gave these works their particular style, and were further developed in Disney’s fairy-tale hits of the early 1950s. Yet the films that established her skills were hit-and-miss affairs: propaganda (including the outstanding “Victory Through Air Power,” which remained unavailable to the general public until its DVD release); compilation films that emphasized music, and projects that combined animation and live action — beginning with the two Latin films.

Live action and animation had been successfully wed in the silent era — it was the selling point for the Fleischer Studios’ “Out of the Inkwell” cartoons, and Disney himself had explored it with less memorable results. But no one made the process work in Technicolor until “Saludos Amigos.” Traveling through South America with his wife and 16 artists and musicians, divided into groups to take in different countries, Disney brought three 16 mm silent cameras. He used that footage to bind the animated stories in “Saludos Amigos,” as well make a half-hour documentary, “South of the Border with Disney,” which is included on a new DVD that represents the first pairing of Disney’s two Latin animations since a 1995 laser disc (two Latin-themed Donald Duck cartoons are also included). The low-grade film stock gives the picture a nostalgic quality, as it looks no better than home movies suburban dads were shooting at the same time.

The film’s early sections are mostly as expected: anthropomorphic views of animals and objects, Donald Duck exploring Lake Titicaca, Goofy doing a gaucho bit on the pampas (employing paintings by the gaucho artist F. Molina Campos), a boy-airplane weathering a storm to deliver the mail. They are nicely done and occasionally funny, but nothing like the last segment.

“Aquarela do Brasil” combines Barroso’s great song with an interpolation of the popular wartime samba, Zequinha de Abreu’s “Tico Tico no Fuba,” which was composed 25 years earlier (Abreu died in 1935), yet remained unknown beyond Brazil until Disney brought it home. Framed by Blair watercolors and sung by Aloysio Oliveira, this sequence also introduces the durable parrot José Carioca, voiced by the actor and bandolim player José Oliveira. Jose gets Donald blind drunk on a cachassa while calmly puffing on his cigar.

“Saludos Amigos” unleashed two songs that became national obsessions, yet it was merely a rehearsal for “The Three Caballeros.” For the first film, an uncredited Carmen Miranda served two days as a consultant. In the second film, her more beautiful sister, Aurora, though never a star in her own right, danced to samba rhythms that Carmen had been turning into box-office gold since her 1940 Hollywood debut in “Down Argentine Way.” A major musical by any standard, “The Three Caballeros” boasts 16 songs, though only five are noted in the credits.

Again, an omnibus structure enfolds discrete tales: Donald gets a box of presents from his South American friends, including a film projector and a screen that he clambers into as easily as Buster Keaton in “Sherlock Jr.” The opening sections concern “strange birds,” including a penguin that would rather live in the tropics, an aracuan (a woodpecker-like creature that also triggers the DVD menu), and a flying donkey. Things jump with the reappearance of José Carioca, who takes Donald to Bahia, where the music includes Dorival Caymmi’s “Have You Ever Been to Bahia?” and the Blair drawings predominate. As Barroso’s powerful “Bahia,” with its vamp and two-part melody, is supplanted by his pulsing samba, “Os Quindins de Ya Ya,” Aurora Miranda dances into view, giving Donald bestial palpitations.

Soon, other dancers are performing against the animated scrim, for a much-imitated and stubbornly adult sequence. Carioca describes one dancer as a malandro, declining to explain the term as Portuguese shorthand for a gigolo. After Aurora kisses Donald, the film cuts to silhouetted dancers who morph into fighting cocks, as the transitions are signaled by crashing cymbals and lightning blasts. This is one of Disney’s great musical sequences. The live action photography, by Technicolor specialist Ray Rennahan, is realized in perfect accord with the processing effects.

Then it gets better still, in Mexico, with the introduction of the third caballero, the rooster Panchito (voiced by Joaquin Garay), who joins Donald (invariably voiced by Clarence Nash) and Carioca for Manuel Esperón’s title song, which is outfitted with a daring English lyric by Ray Gilbert. Except for a smarmy Christmas interlude and a gringo ballad (Disney’s Charles Wolcott was a talented music director and a dreadful songwriter), things go into overdrive, as the gay caballeros prove how gay they can be, at one point dancing in drag with live-action female legs.

After Donald ogles bathing beauties at an Acapulco beach (actually the Disney parking lot filled with sand), Doña Luz enters as a disembodied head, singing Augustin Lara’s “You Belong to My Heart,” which would soon be a major hit for Bing Crosby. The influence of Busby Berkeley is everywhere — floating heads, freewheeling hallucinations and, especially, the stunning “Jesusita,” where Luz dances at the apex of many Donalds who grow into giant phallic cactuses. The inventiveness dazzles. As the caballeros finish their song, Panchito holds the last note for 20 seconds, giving the animators time to pile on nearly a dozen sight gags. At a list price of $20, who could pass it up?

However! This is one of the most disappointing DVDs Disney has released. The films are in excellent shape — colors brighter than in previous incarnations, images stabilized. Yet in 1995, they triggered one of the most comprehensive and insightful packages in the annals of home video. The laser-disc edition of “Saludos Amigos” and “The Three Caballeros” includes hundreds of drawings (many Blair watercolors), photographs, storyboards, a detailed explanation of how animation and live action work, newsreel and studio footage, advertising materials, radio broadcasts and, above all, fastidious reconstructions of two cartoons slated for the films but never completed. Is all that work now consigned to a studio vault, or is a collector’s edition in the works?