Song of the South

Harve Foster & Wilfred Jackson – 1946 – USA

This controversial and scarcely available film was the Disney company’s bold experiment in merging animation with live-action.  It was the stepping-stone to Disney’s entirely live-action features that began with Treasure Island (1950).  The disparate filmmaking styles are surprisingly harmonious even by today’s standards (such as they are); but it also brims with Disney’s dated and borderline intolerable schmaltz.  I didn’t find Song of the South especially racist, except inasmuch as the older black characters are certainly stereotypes.  The biggest charge against this movie is that it portrays blacks as happily subservient to whites, which it does, but it is worth noting that the blacks are not slaves, but freed sharecroppers; not that this is a cataclysmic distinction in the old South.  As much as there are any (human) villains in the film, they are the white closed-minded mother and the two pre-adolescent white bullies.  The hero is undoubtedly Uncle Remus, played with warm and spiritual dignity by James Baskett.  Nevertheless, the period evoked is discomforting and it’s understandable why it wouldn’t be recommended viewing for some, but I don’t think it deserves to be banned and maligned the way it is.  After seeing it, it does seem clear to me that most of the people who insist that it continue to be buried as Disney’s shame really haven’t seen it.