Movies - Song of the South

Home > Listing Index > Movies > Song of the South

	Movies - Song of the South

Song of the South is a feature film produced by Walt Disney Productions, released on November 12, 1946 by RKO Radio Pictures and based on the Uncle Remus cycle of stories by Joel Chandler Harris. It was one of Walt Disney's earliest feature films to combine live action footage with animation and was the first Disney feature film in which live actors were hired for lead roles. The live actors provide a sentimental frame-story, in which Uncle Remus relates the folk tales of the adventures of Brer Rabbit and his friends; these anthropomorphic animal characters appear in animation. The film is often the subject of controversy, because of content which is considered by some to be racially insensitive towards African-Americans. It has never been released in the U.S. on DVD or home video, and is thus subject to much rumor and speculation.

Plot

The setting is the Southern United States, in a "dream time" shortly after the American Civil War, which folklorist Patricia A. Turner characterizes as happening "during a surreal time when blacks lived on quarters on a plantation, worked diligently for no visible reward and considered Atlanta a viable place for an old black man to set out for."

The frame tale does not follow the original framing narrative by Harris. While Disney Studios tried to avoid the more offensive stereotypes of African Americans still common in the 1940s, Disney also tried to make sure that nothing in the film would be objected to by the white segregationists then in political control of the Southern United States. This resulted in the subservient relationships of the black children towards white child Johnny, played by child star Bobby Driscoll, in his Fauntleroy suit, that are particularly stilted and perhaps unintentionally revealing. Few recent critics found the results of this attempted balancing act successful, though it passed without comment in 1946, aside from a mild rebuke from the NAACP. Blacks are shown as subservient to whites, and singing contentedly about "home". The framing story has therefore been accused of idealizing the harsh lives of blacks on rural southern plantations in the Jim Crow era.

The hit song from the film was "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah", which won the 1947 Academy Award for Best Song.

Controversy

Although the film has been re-released several times (most recently in 1986 in the United States), Disney has avoided making it available on home video tape or DVD in the United States because the frame story was deemed controversial by studio management. Film critic Roger Ebert has supported this position, noting that most Disney films become a part of the consciousness of American children, who take films more literally than do adults. The film has been released on video in various European and Asian countries. In the U.S., only excerpts from the animated segments have ever appeared in Disney's DVDs and television shows, and the popular log-flume attraction Splash Mountain is based upon the same animated portions.

In February 2005, jimhillmedia.com released reports that the film was to come out on DVD in the third quarter of 2006. Among the rumored bonus features are a documentary about multiculturalism in Disney properties, the short John Henry
, and a recurrent host to introduce the film, and talk about it in historical context. Until allegations of his sexual misconduct emerged, Bill Cosby was the frontrunner to be cast in this role.

Despite the report by Jim Hill Media, though, on Friday, March 10, 2006 at a Disney Shareholder Meeting this exchange took place between a shareholder and Disney CEO Bob Iger:

"My name is Howard Cromer. I live in Cypress, I'm a Disney shareholder. I'm actually delivering a message from my son, 10. He wants to know in recent years, in the midst of all your re-releases of your videos, why you haven't released Song of the South on your Disney Classics?" "And, he wonders why. Frank Wells told me many years ago that it would be coming out. Well obviously Frank Wells isn't around anymore, so we still wonder why. And by the way, Mr. Iger, he thinks it was a very good choice when they made you CEO of Disney."

Iger: "Thank you very much. You may change your mind when I answer your question, though. Um... we've discussed this a lot. We believe it's actually an opportunity from a financial perspective to put Song of the South out. I screened it fairly recently because I hadn't seen it since I was a child, and I have to tell you after I watched it, even considering the context that it was made, I had some concerns about it because of what it depicted. And thought it's quite possible that people wouldn't consider it in the context that it was made, and there were some... depictions that I mentioned earlier in the film that I think would be bothersome to a lot of people. And so, owing to the sensitivity that exists in our culture, balancing it with the desire to, uh, maybe increase our earnings a bit, but never putting that in front of what we thought were our ethics and our integrity, we made the decision not to re-release it. Not a decision that is made forever, I imagine this is gonna continue to come up, but for now we simply don't have plans to bring it back because of the sensitivities that I mentioned. Sorry."
[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Song of the South ]

Some related entries: Disneyland After Dark | House Party | The Set-Up | Silent Night, Deadly Night | The Stepford Wives | The Twonky | Heist film | Dummy | Behind the Paint | Johnny and the Sprites | Genesis
This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Song of the South; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Movies - Song of the South

Plot

Controversy

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay