Animated Racism: Scholarly Trends through the Lens of Song of the South
This paper was originally written for the “Hollywood Film Historiography” course within the Film and Media Studies graduate program at Arizona State University, completed December 6, 2019.
The study of both popular and scholarly coverage of Song of the South, Walt Disney’s live-action/animated hybrid musical, is a study of a generally unified yet somewhat obscured consensus. Since the film was released in 1946, attention has been paid to its “Uncle Tom” storyline that trivializes the slave experience in the South in the Reconstruction era. Recent scholarship and media coverage of the film focuses on Disney’s unwillingness to reissue the film in any home video format in North America due to the accusations of racism and unfavorable stereotypes of African Americans leveled against it.
However, because of the relative difficulty in accessing it, viewership of Song of the South, and therefore modern interpretation of it, has been relegated to “specialist” viewers such as scholars and critics. The details of the film have been obscured by time and its relative invisibility, sequestering it in a scholarly feedback loop. This in and of itself is not necessarily a negative thing, although a valuable aspect of film scholarship could be to see the impact or influence of a film on everyday audiences in the wake of a movie’s original release. That effect cannot necessarily be described for Song of the South. Among those “in the know,” such as scholars and critics, a unified consensus that the film “is racist” exists. However, that consensus is somewhat obscured for everyday audiences who may not have seen the film, but have heard of its notorious nature.
Further complicating the issue is the passage of the film’s more fantastical elements, such as the hit song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” and the animated Br’er characters, into the pop culture mainstream without the context of its source material. For example, many are familiar with the Splash Mountain ride at the Disney amusement parks, which pulls from Song of the South’s animated sequences for its aesthetic and animatronic characters. And in fact, much of the film’s “problematic” content lies in its live action portions. However, I selected Song of the South as a case study for trends in the conversation about racism in animated films because of its place in the vast Disney cartoon canon and its lasting impact lying mostly with the animated sequences, which make up about 30 percent of the film’s 94-minute run time.
Contemporaneous popular coverage of Song of the South acknowledged, even in the segregated America of 1946, that there was a “whitewashing” and idealizing of the black experience in the post-Civil War South. Like many reviews written upon the film’s release, Time’s coverage of the film praised the animation while lamenting its relative scarcity. The uncredited writer of the piece then goes on to say, “Ideologically, the picture is certain to land its maker in hot water.” The writer describes the Uncle Remus character, central to the film, as one “who cheerfully ‘knew his place’” and who was “bound to enrage all educated Negroes, and a number of damyankees” (“The New Pictures, Nov. 18, 1946”).
Bosley Crowther, writing for The New York Times, had similar things to say in his contemporaneous review. “The ratio of ‘live’ to cartoon action is approximately two to one — and that is approximately the ratio of its mediocrity to charm,” he wrote (“The Screen; ‘Song of the South,’ Disney Film Combining Cartoons and Life, Opens of Palace — Abbott and Costello of Loew’s Criterion”). Although Crowther did not address the film’s potentially controversial elements, paired with his review was a news snippet about comments from Walter White, executive secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). “It [the NAACP] regrets, however, that in an effort neither to offend audiences in the North or South, the production helps to perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery,” The New York Times quoted White. “Making use of the beautiful Uncle Remus folklore, ‘Song of the South’ unfortunately gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship which is a distortion of the facts.”
This popular coverage and the discussion on a national scale about the trouble with Song of the South tracks for later conversations. However, if there is to be a special consideration paid to the discourse from 1946, it’s that it is more defined by direct address of the film’s aesthetic qualities (and criticism thereof), with its social implications and effects talked about almost as an afterthought. This dynamic would be somewhat reversed over the decades.
Although Song of the South has never been released for home video in North America, Disney did do so for foreign territories on VHS, and re-released it in American theaters over the course of 40 years. Disney reissued Song of the South in theaters for the last time (as of 2019) in 1986. Writing for the Los Angeles Times at that time, Charles Solomon echoes critics of 1946 by focusing initially on the movie’s artistic merits. Ultimately, he devotes a paragraph to discussion about the “dated…depictions of the black characters.” “The film is very much a ’40s Hollywood vision of the Ole South,” Solomon wrote. “Although Uncle Remus is permitted to exchange a conspiratorial wink with the shrewd old grandmother, he and Toby remain passive characters who patiently endure scoldings for things that aren’t their fault.” Otherwise, he gives it a loose endorsement, saying ““Song of the South” is essentially a nostalgic valentine to a past that never existed, and within those limits, it offers a pleasant, family diversion for holiday afternoons when the children get restless” (“Movie Review: Animation Sings in ‘Song of the South’”).
By the 1990s, as I illustrated in the first part of my film historiography project, animated film scholarship had gotten more “serious,” with a greater number of academics and critics analyzing cartoons at scale with live action canon. This, combined with perhaps an awareness of the “freeze” on Song of the South as the Disney “Renaissance” was in its throes and the Disney “Vault” was opening more and more to bring forth old classics to home video, increased coverage of the film.
As an indication of the kind of specificity that was coming to animated film scholarship, Matthew Bernstein’s 1996 article “Nostalgia, Ambivalence, Irony: ‘Song of the South’ and Race Relations in 1946 Atlanta” stands out. In it, he “contrasts the responses of white and black Atlantans [the film premiered in Atlanta] to Song of the South.” He found that while the two major Atlantan daily newspapers showed “unabashed enthusiasm” for the movie, the single black daily, the Atlanta Daily World, was “ambivalent” (Bernstein 219). Contextualizing this within the national response, especially the more critical comments coming from white liberals and black civil leaders, Bernstein does the exact kind of historiographical work that wasn’t as prominent in prior decades. He fuses the histories of both Song of the South itself and the realities that African Americans faced in the time it depicted and in which it was made and released.
Scott Schaffer, in “Disney and the Imagineering of Histories,” takes similar steps. Also published in 1996, his scholarly article first looks at how the animated films of Disney “treat local stories and histories as fodder for ‘’the rapacious strip-miner’ in the goldmine of legend and myth,’’ (Kunzle, in Dorfman and Mattelart 1971:18) and attempt to sell to those who have their stories taken a perception that they are supposed to have of themselves — that of the cultural “Other of America.” These arguments are then transposed to the geographical implications of the Disney theme parks. “As well, Splash Mountain, based on Song of the South, which contains the line, ‘This is how the niggers sing,’ disguises its origins in the lore of American slavery, and instead exists in the fantastic realm of Critter Country,” Schaffer wrote. A broad trend in the coverage of racism in animated film has been relating its simplification of broad historical moments or settings to the streamlining of white America, and Schaffer’s piece fits into that trend. Precisely because of its larger than life reputation and specific, if weak, wrangling of a difficult time in American history, Song of the South played a crucial part in developing animated film scholarship. It served as a large target and perfect example for the arguments presented in Bernstein and Schaffer’s article.
As with many things, however, the internet has created an even broader metatextual conversation. In “Reassuring Convergence: Online Fandom, Race, and Disney’s Notorious Song of the South” (2010), Jason Sperb “explores recent Internet fan activity around Walt Disney’s notorious Song of the South” (Sperb 25). Sperb opens his piece with a remarkable summation of the kind of “postmodern” take that has infiltrated filmic discourse, a quotation from Hollis Henry’s 2005 article “Song of a Never-Was South.” “The question isn’t whether the film should be banned,” Henry wrote. “The important phenomenon is the [internet’s] legion of incensed and activist fans (white and black) of the movie, fighting hard to have Disney release Song of the South. They argue it’s only a children’s movie. They say any offensive elements the film might have can be looked past. They say Walt Disney’s intentions were good. And most importantly, they question whether the film is offensive at all.”
I quote Henry at such length because it opens up a conversation as the internet has done in countless quarters. As more and more audiences are exposed to material they may never have accessed before the internet, film scholarship has taken on an even wider historiographical bent. Articles like Sperb’s attempt to track the distribution of information in the digital age, and how conext may have been lost along the way. For example, Sperb wrote, “What’s interesting about intellectual properties in the age of ‘convergence culture’ [in which consumers connect media and experiences in a search for more knowledge] is not how they expand but rather more often how they dissipate, habitually becoming less narratively and thematically coherent” (Sperb 26). Only recently, and in relatively small circles, has the dynamic that’s been applied to Song of the South been disrupted as interested parties go above and beyond to seek out “content.” Sperb argued that Disney’s self-censorship of Song of the South has done nothing to remove it from the public consciousness. The idea that it has been “is problematized by the visibility of its [Song of the South’s] fans, who vocally wish to see it reissued…the very act of advocacy itself gives Song continued life and circulation,” Sperb wrote (30).
This discussion of what should be ruled out of acceptable viewing canon has proliferated in recent years, and in some ways, the development of Song of the South’s reputation epitomizes the defenses of other Disney stereotypes, as with the crow characters that represent black stereotypes in Dumbo (1941), other instances of racism in animation, as with the “Censored Eleven” Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoons, and even live action films like The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939). The snowballing social effect of media such as these is described by Daniel Stein in “From Uncle Remus to Song of the South: Adapting American Plantation Fictions” (2015). “They constitute a transmedia phenomenon,” Stein wrote. “Americans were so inundated with representations of the southern plantation” (21).
Stein’s angle lies in the nature of adaptation and our society’s method of retelling stories over and over. Because of course, as has yet been unmentioned here, Song of the South was crafted as a frame story to tell the Uncle Remus stories, African American folklore developed on the plantation, themselves adapted by Joel Chandler Harris (a white man). Stein traces this spin-off effect by labeling Disney’s film as not only an adaptation, but also a remediation of Harris’ texts. By pointing out the differences between the film and Harris’ stories (and even Harris’ stories and the tradition of African American folklore), Stein connects Song of the South to a broad cultural trend that has been in effect for 150 years. “What I take to be the most significant lesson of Uncle Remus and Song of the South is that American plantation fictions, and perhaps even American culture at large, thrive on practices of make-believe and masquerade, role-playing and tricksterism, performing identities and staging illusions,” Stein wrote (31). He uses coverage of racism in animation, an ever-growing segment of film scholarship, to implicate trends in American storytelling at large.
This chronological exploration of popular and scholarly coverage of Song of the South illustrates the depth to be explored in animated films, a segment of the film industry that did not receive a large array of serious attention until the 1970s, barring landmark texts from the likes of Sergei Eisenstein. The ongoing discussion about Song of the South, which continues to surface in new, thought-provoking ways, is a cornerstone of that development. Its mistakes are so glaring, so often criticized that its value as a cinematic scholarship tool is to bust open the door, as it were, to create a mindset that can interpret the social impact, whether intentional or not, of the content that shows up in what is mostly children-targeted entertainment. Going forward, Song of the South will be no less relevant; in the wake of Disney’s own streaming service, Disney+, conversation about the film has resurfaced at a much higher level. Warnings about stereotypical images in their classic films now precede many of them on the service, further wrinkling how we can talk about Song of the South in an intensely more aware yet polarized media landscape. Future scholarship on the subject of the film, as has been especially articulated by Sperb and Stein, will be a metatextual and, indeed, historiographical prospect that traces perception of Song of the South in a world with a lot of context at our disposal; context, however, that isn’t always seen, understood, or leveraged.
Works Cited
Bernstein, Matthew. “Nostalgia, Ambivalence, Irony: ‘Song of the South’ and Race Relations in 1946 Atlanta.” Film History, vol. 8, no. 2, 1996.
Crowther, Bosley. “The Screen; ‘Song of the South,’ Disney Film Combining Cartoons and Life, Opens of Palace — Abbott and Costello of Loew’s Criterion.” The New York Times, 28 Nov. 1946.
Henry, Hollis. “Song of a Never-Was South.” The Black Commentator, http://blackcommentator.com/139/139_south.html. 19 May 2005.
“The New Pictures, Nov. 18, 1946.” Time, 18 Nov. 1946.
Schaffer, Scott. “Disney and the Imagineering of Histories.” Postmodern Culture, vol. 6, no. 3, May 1996.
Solomon, Charles. “Movie Review: Animation Sings in ‘Song of the South.’” Los Angeles Times, 21 Nov. 1986.
Sperb, Jason. “Reassuring Convergence: Online Fandom, Race, and Disney’s Notorious Song of the South.” Cinema Journal, vol. 49, no. 4, summer 2010.
Stein, Daniel. “From Uncle Remus to Song of the South: Adapting American Plantation Fictions.” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 47, no. 2, spring 2015.
