Not ignoring racist aspects of the Disney version, but the actual tales of Br’er Rabbit predate Song of the South and aren’t inherently racist themselves. They are more like Aesop’s fables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Remus.
What bugged me about the movie was it continued the Disney pattern with princesses of color. They get different outcomes than the rest. Here’s how I summed this up. Girl dreams of owning her own restaurant; saves her money; is prevented from her goal by villain; meets lazy, disinherited, womanizing prince with a problem; gets pulled into his drama; has magical adventure with prince & falls for him; conquers the villain; marries the prince - who has learned to not stop being selfish and to (gasp) work; and finally achieves the dream she had all along.
In the end, she’s a princess who owns and runs a restaurant with her hubby. It’s a more modern tale, with themes of hard work and sacrifice so common in previous Disney stories. After it came out, I figured the princess genre would have fewer castles and more café owners, but Tangled, Brave, and Moana were next.
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Like Aesop’s fables if appropriated and popularised by a Roman who thought the Greeks were better off enslaved, who re-wrote them in a cartoonishly exagerated dialect, and who mixed in some non-Greek folk stories to round out the collection and keep the book sales rolling in.
The Uncle Remus stories in and of themselves aren’t inherently racist, but Joel Chandler Harris (the man who “collected” them and popularised them) was.
Seriously, that podcast really is worth a listen. While it strives for balance and historical context, it makes the case that even the source material for the movie is deeply enmeshed with American racism. The first episode discusses Harris.
Technical achievements aside, there’s just not a lot of redeeming value in the film or its creative sources, either now or at the time it was made. There’s even less value in the theming of the Splash Mountain ride, where anyone under 40 will be puzzled by the inclusion of characters they’ve never seen in a Disney film doing things that make no sense but who might be encouraged to sing a catchy version of a racist lyric.
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By the eighties I wasn’t watching tge show as carefully as when I was a kid.
I do remember an excerpt, “Zippidi-Doo-Dah” or however it’s spelled. Complete with animated birds. Nothing bad about that excerpt, I’m sure I’ve never seen the full movie.
I can’t remember why they had the excerpt, maybe showing off live/animated fusions, when Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released.
But all I remember is seeing that one excerpt.
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My parents had the whole thing recorded on VHS so i rewatched it a few times. I never particularly cared for it to be honest, i almost want to say that the way it was broadcast on TV when my parents recorded it was that it preceded Dumbo, which is another movie with racist themes. I could be misremembering what was on the tape but regardless as a kid i disliked Song of the South and Dumbo, as an adult i’m glad i had no interest in them.
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And the some of the Br’er Rabbit tales are lessons in resistance. At least that’s the way I read “Don’t fling me into the briar patch.”
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I remember the theatrical version coming through my town sometime around 1982 ish. At the time the racist stuff went over my head completely (I was 10), but I remember thinking it wasn’t a very good movie.
I hate ice cream trucks! Well, not really.
Tangled definitely had the typical Disney princess story, but I thought that Brave was a bit different from their usual offerings in that the princess came from an intact family, hated wearing pretty princess clothes, didn’t end up marrying anyone, and lived in a stark castle (a military installation) rather than a luxurious palace. In Moana I appreciated that she didn’t seem to follow a typical Disney princess narrative at all, and there wasn’t even a hint at a romantic interest in the plot.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the Frozen movies though. Many aspects of those movies were typical Disney princess stuff.
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Thanks for 'splaining that to the forum, as if we have not had many previous (and repetitive) conversations on the subject of racism and Disney, and like none of us know where the source material for SotS was stolen from:
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True, Brave was a departure from the usual Disney mold. Still, the princess had a lot of privilege and choices (because of her wealth and class). The physical labor normally done by women her age wouldn’t leave much time for the pursuits she enjoyed. Also, her castle was huge - a far cry from that place where the witch lived.
In Moana I appreciated that she didn’t seem to follow a typical Disney princess narrative at all
I’m not sure any Disney princesses of color followed the typical narrative.
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Literally the only thing I remember from the movie is the black kid tripping over a log that the white kids had no problem with
The racism was not subtle, or invisible to children
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I thought this line from the movie was a clever bit of self-awareness. It’s even funnier if you think of Maui’s mansplaining as the official position of the Walt Disney Corporation and its associated merchandising interests.
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Yet another thing appropriated by white people…
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Story time… When WEB DuBois was working at the Atlanta University Center, he was given a letter of introduction to meet Joel Chandler Harris, who was working at the…I can’t remember if it was the Journal or Constitute, but prior to the merger… and off he goes to downtown. He is walking to the building, looks down by a shop, and sees the fingers of a lynched black man on sale on a table. He gets so pissed off he just marches right back home and never meets Harris, who at the time would have been a powerful ally to have in publishing in ATL.
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Well of course they wouldn’t give credit to the slaves who originally wrote the song. The fact that several people claimed credit suggests that they were just trying to cash in on something that was already popular.
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Quite possible. So then you’ve learned that the song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” from the movie was in fact freighted with all kinds of racism, from theft to minstrelry to its association with a film that was deemed racist by Black people even in 1946.
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Is that relevant here? Sorry kids, you’re not allowed to like your own songs anymore, because some asshole white person made money off of it.
Yes. It is. History matters, and being able to ignore it is a white privilege.
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Erasing someone’s cultural heritage because unrelated people did stuff with it is whitewashing.
You have to separate the music from the assholes making fun of people using their own music. Otherwise you allow the assholes to erase the history of the very people they are making fun of.
