Disneyology

My video is performing absurdly better than my average work so timeliness can suck a dick.

(I will 100% be watching Lindsay's video later tonight. She's the best.)

God knows why. That video's one of my worst.

Timeliness

The record's been broken.

Top video keeps switching between Indiana Jones (thanks to Nazi trolls) and Once Upon a Time in America (thanks to people calling me a cuck). Hooray for spite clicks.

Coming soon: videos about The Last Jedi and Joker

I have considered doing a Last Jedi video a couple of times but I doubt I ever will. Talking about Star Wars on the internet sucks.

Disneyology 201

The Live Action/Animation Hybrids

Three years ago I embarked on a rather ambitious project to watch and write about all of Disney’s animated films for a series I called Disneyology 101. That worked out well enough, but there was still some unfinished business left over and I seek to correct that with a new series called Disneyology 201 which looks the company’s basic canon of feature length animated films and explores some of the other nooks and crannies of the company’s legacy. This will likely be done sporadically with long pauses between installments rather than the quick pace I kept when doing Disneyology 101 (expect it to correlate heavily with new seasons of “The Mandalorian” and the MCU shows because I do not intend to stay subscribed to Disney+ permanently). For the first installment I intend to look at the live action films that Disney made over the years which heavily combined in elements of traditional 2D animation. This was something the company would uses sporadically over their history after first pioneering it in the 40s and then reviving it in the 60s and 70s, but they would ultimately only use it for a handful of films, opting instead to focus primarily on either pure animation or pure live action for the vast majority of their films. Of course to really examine this topic one must first begin with the film that started it all, 1946’s Song of the South, a work of such infamy that I will likely focus most of my attention to part one of this retrospective exclusively on it.

Song of the South (1946)



On November 12th 1946 Walt Disney staged the world premiere of his new film, Song of the South, at the Fox Theater in Atlanta Georgia, not far from where Gone With the Wind had premiered seven years earlier. And like the premiere of that film, stars James Baskett and Hattie McDaniel were refused entry to their own premiere because Atlanta’s strict segregation laws would not allow an event of this nature to be integrated. From that rather unpleasant beginning the film would go on to be, by far, the most controversial film Disney ever put out and has been on something of a roller coaster between public embrace and public disdain. The movie earned mixed reviews upon first release and was only a moderate box office success but was not a beloved hit. James Baskett would go on to receive an honorary Oscar for his performance (something his boss Walt Disney almost certainly pulled some strings to make happen) and the film also earned an Oscar for its main song and most enduring element “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” but aside from that it sort of came and went during a time when Disney was not really at the top of its game. The film would go on to earn more money upon re-release, including some rather disturbingly successful runs in the 70s and 80s where it was likely actually seen by more people that it was back in 1946 and it would eventually become the thematic basis for the popular Disneyland attraction Splash Mountain. Those re-releases did however garner the film increased scrutiny for its retrograde racial depictions and in the time since then as Disney grew larger and became more image-conscious they’ve come to view the film as an embarrassment and have refused to distribute on home video for the last thirty or so years and likely do not intend to do so in the future.

As the film has been removed from the public eye its split the opinions of fans down the middle with some saying it’s been unfairly maligned and others suggesting it’s even worse than its reputation and it’s been hard for anyone to make up their own mind on the topic because they can’t see it for themselves. As such I’ve managed to obtain a copy (through legally ambiguous means) and decided to finally watch the movie and figure out where I stand on it. I hope to figure out three things: is the movie as racist as its reputation suggests? What does it say about the Walt Disney Corporation’s history? How do I feel about its effective “cancellation” by its own creators? And, most importantly, is the damn thing even any good to begin with?

I’ll start with that last question: no, the damn thing is not any good to begin with… or at least it’s probably not good enough to be worth all this trouble. The film is ostensibly set during reconstruction (though a year is never quoted in the movie and audiences could well mistake it as being set in the antebellum) on a Southern plantation that a seven year old white kid travels to in order to live with his grandmother and mother for a period while his father is away. While there the kid meets a kindly old black man named Uncle Remus (who is presumably a former slave) who takes to telling him a bunch of folk stories about a character named “Br'er Rabbit” which help him with some of his mundane white kid problems like dealing with local redneck bullies, but his mother becomes wary of the influence these stories are having for… reasons… and it all culminates in the kid getting injured after he stupidly runs into a bull’s pen… but he gets better and everyone’s happy.

So, as you can probably tell that’s a really simple story that really doesn’t have a lot going on in it. The biggest conflict in the whole thing is a the mother’s uncertainty about the influence of Remus’ stories on the child, but her reasons for feeling this way are never clear and she just sort of gets over it at the end. Beyond that it’s just a very episodic and insubstantial story that just kind of exists to act as a framing narrative to include the animated segments that illustrate Remus’ stories. In fact I kind of suspect that if Walt Disney had had his druthers the whole movie would have just been an animated film about these Br'er Rabbit stories as they are very plainly the aspect of the film everyone put the most work into. So why were the live action sections included? Probably as a cost cutting measure. Disney was not in good financial shape in 1946, the war had really desimated their productivity and had cut off lucrative European markets. In the eight years between Bambi (1942) and Cinderella (1950) they didn’t really have the funds to make feature length films outside of commissioned war propaganda and compromised shorts compilation package films. So, making a live action hybrid like this was a good way to make a film where they’d only have to make some twenty minutes of animation and then pad the rest of the film out with this cheap half-assed story about happy southerners living together.

But what of the animated segments? They’re alright, at least on a technical level. The film’s famous “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” sequence does stand out, firstly because that song is quite the earworm and secondly because it really stands out after thirty some minutes of lifeless inanity. The rest of the animated sequences (though frequently offensive in their own right, more on that later) are sporadically entertaining, but they aren’t really offering much you can’t otherwise get in your average Warner Brothers cartoon and they don’t singlehandedly save the movie which is, frankly, quite boring. If you aren’t interested in looking at this film historically and parsing its racial politics it is simply not a very entertaining experience, so if you’ve been craving this piece of forbidden fruit you really aren’t missing anything that special.

So, is this thing racist or what? Short answer, yes. Having said that, the movie isn’t necessarily as aggressively offensive as you may think given the endless cloud of controversy it exists under. This isn’t The Birth of a Nation, and for that matter I’m not sure I’d say it’s any more racist than Gone With the Wind, and I also don’t think it was necessarily made with malice. At its worst the movie basically just makes the same mistake that their more contemporary bad idea of a movie Pocahontas made: thinking they could just whitewash the hell out of a very dark period of American history. The post-war South was not a fun time or place to be an African American; people were pushed into poverty, the Ku Klux Klan was in ascendance, former “masters” were openly hostile, and lynching was an ever-present threat… but you wouldn’t know that from watching this movie. Here Uncle Remus is happy to still be serving his former owners, as is the maid “Aunt Tempe” played by Hattie McDaniel, and the only other African American of note in the film is this sort of wild mostly personality free kid that our white protagonist befriends: an “Uncle Tom,” a “Mammy,” and a “Pickaninny.” Remus has basically no internal life or ambition in life other than to help this white kid and we see nothing of the scars he would almost certainly bear from years of enslavement. Meanwhile its left unsaid how these white people got this plantation or if they were former slave owners, but that’s kind of the most logical assumption to make, especially given the undying loyalty their servants seem to show toward them. And of course all this is if you follow the company line that this is all happening in the post-war era, as I said before the film is fairly ambiguous about when its set and I’m sure plenty of audiences have assumed that this is a plantation, that these happy black people are straight-up slaves, and that paints an even darker picture of how much about “the South” this film is lying about by omission.

For a while Disney’s approach to handling the movie was essentially to strip it for parts. They’d include “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” in their musical compilations and they’d use the “Br'er Rabbit” sections out of context in places like Splash Mountain under the assumption that it was the film’s live action segments that were the “real” bad parts and that they animated bits everyone actually liked were innocent but that isn’t really the case. “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” is, in fact, heavily influenced by the minstrel show standard “Zip Coon” (the problematic nature of which likely does not require explanation) and also draws on some rather racially insensitive versions of “Turkey in the Straw.” As for the “Br'er Rabbit” cartoons? Well, they and the Uncle Remus character are ultimately drawn from the work of a white southerner named Joel Chandler Harris who claimed these stories to have been drawn from authentic slave folklore but he almost certainly put them through a white guy filter and each of the film’s animated segments have some rather unsavory subtext if you’re looking at them in context. The first story involves the rabbit trying to travel away from his warren only to then encounter a fight with Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear, which is supposed to teach him that his home is where he belongs even if he thinks he doesn’t like it. It’s hard not to watch that and not view it as some sort of allegory for the Great Migration North that many African Americans of the period made to escape overt violence from the KKK and others, and in that context this “moral” is rather dubious. The next animated segment is even more undeniably odious as it involves Br’er Fox trying to trap Br’er Rabbit by placing a baby doll at the side of the road which he made out of hot tar… a “tar baby” if you will to ensnare this rabbit in hot goo… does the offensiveness of this need further explanation?

So, not a very good movie, and I wouldn’t recommend renting it or buying it if you could… but you can’t. So what do I think about Dinsney’s decision to keep this thing out of circulation? Well, given that I just watched the movie it would be a little hypocritical of me to say “I can watch this, but you can’t handle it.” Obviously there are plenty of “good” reasons to want to watch this movie and examine its legacy and people who want to do that should ideally have some sort of access to it. What’s more there are certainly ways to release these sort of dated products in a respectful way which provides context for what you’re watching and outlets like Criterion and Kino put out all sorts of things that are almost certainly more problematic than this and they do it well. Having said all that, Disney is not Criterion and for that matter it’s not even Warner Brothers. “Disney” is a brand name that is synonymous with family entertainment and also with the mass market, they aren’t really capable of targeting niche cinephille markets like Criterion can nor can they simply release something “for adults” like Warner can when they put out Gone With the Wind blu-rays. There would be something rather obscene about Disney “letting the movie out of the vault” and putting out a “75th Anniversary Diamond Edition Blu-Ray” out on the shelf for anyone to pick up and unsuspectingly shot to the tots at will and it would probably be just as ill-advised to throw it onto Disney+ next to The Lion King for any four year old to stumble across. On some level I think Disney knows that they can’t really present this thing without crassly monetizing it and in a way I respect the self-awareness in that and don’t really blame them for not wanting to “go there.”
*1/2 out of Five

So Dear to My Heart (1948)



Two years after the release of Song of the South Disney released another film combining live action and animated elements called So Dear to My Heart which I think was meant as a sort of spiritual sequel which did for the Midwest what its predecessor did for the South. The film has not had the same kind of infamous legacy as Song of the South, but it hasn’t really had much of a legacy at all… in fact it’s kind of fallen into obscurity. I actually did encounter this once at a summer program when I was about ten or eleven. It was a rainy day so during the time we’d normally be outside the old lady who was running things decided to just huddle everyone in the cafeteria and play a movie and this was the VHS she brought in. I’d never heard of it and upon hearing the title I thought it sounded so lame that I just went to the back of the room and played Go Fish with a friend rather than watch it and having seen it now I can say… I didn’t miss much.

The film stars Bobby Driscoll, who was also the main white kid in Song of the South. I didn’t talk much about him when I looked at that movie because there were bigger fish to fry, but he was a kid that Disney decided to invest in pretty heavily during the late forties and early fifties when they put him in these two movies as well as their fully live action Treasure Island and would also make him the voice of Peter Pan. They then pretty much dropped him when he stopped being a cute kid however and he would go on to have a terribly life even by child star standards… to the point that when he died a drug related death at age 31 people didn’t even recognize his body and he wouldn’t be identified until two years later. Anyway, I hate the little shit, he’s one of these irritatingly clean-cut 50s kids who seems to really like saying “Gee Wiz” a lot. Anyway, the movie is pretty much built around this kid and is this inane story about a farm kid raising a sheep and hoping to bring it to the county fair in order to win a prize. The animation comes in when the kid has some weird hallucinations about a owl giving him advice and they’re generally average to uninspired.

The film’s semi-random song about the bravery of Christopher Columbus hasn’t aged well but the film is otherwise very very white and generally devoid of any people or color or much of anything else that could be considered controversial. It’s basically all the things that made Song of the South a rather boring viewing experience but none of the retrograde racial politics that I had so much “fun” parsing. On some level I guess the fact that this isn’t overtly offensive makes it “better,” but also makes it a lot less noteworthy. Also the animated sequences feel more disconnected than they did in that movie and there isn’t any music that’s nearly as earwormy as “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” In general with So Dear to My Heart we get a glimpse at the disinterest people would probably have in Song of the South if not for the fact that it was a touchstone for controversy. It’s decidedly inessential.
*1/2 out of Five

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