The forbidden film arrived in the mail years after buying it. The unlabeled, burned blu-ray arrived in a paper sleeve. I felt unclean just owning this, as if I was part of a tape trading community for some horrific form of pornography.
It seems surreal to me one can walk into a Barnes & Noble and buy a blu-ray of Passolini’s Salo nowadays, when that was the subject of an attempted pandering charge as recently as 1996, yet there’s nowhere one can legally buy a new copy of the 1946 Disney film Song of the South. In the US, it was never even released on VHS. And yet, here is that forbidden film on that unlabeled disc. I was reluctant to watch it, and so it sat on the shelf for a year or two more.
The big issue with this film is obviously the racist elements, and those are problematic. Still, not that it excuses anything, but, when you see enough cinema from that era and earlier, you will see portrayals of Black people that are downright hateful. At best, the tone is condescending, as the kindly Uncle Remus (James Baskett) tells fables to a little white boy (Bobby Driscoll) to entertain and to teach important life lessons.
It’s a shame this film has been buried by the House of the Mouse since, by preventing new viewers from seeing Baskett’s performance, they are burying a great performance by a Black actor. Regardless of how this character is presented, I challenge anybody to say an unkind word about Baskett’s work here.
He especially does a great job interacting with cartoon creatures when he appears in scenes that are a hybrid of live action and cell animation. Keep in mind this is long before motion capture, so he is likely interacting with nothing, and yet I did not find fault once in his eyelines. There’s a very brief moment that left quite an impression on me, where he extends one finger with which he “shakes hands” with a cartoon figure.
As expected from Disney, the animation is top-notch, though there is a noticeable reduction in detail from such earlier films as Snow White or Pinocchio. Still, you get some of examples of the art of Mary Blair, who would go on to greater renown with the mid-century stylings of Cinderella.
One exceptional bit of animation is remarkable because of how thoroughly it is integrated into the scene, and that is an animated fishing line cast from a pole held by Baskett. He’s deep in the background casting that line, which plants a cartoon cork float right in front of us.
But the most legendary scene, and justifiably so, is “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”. The start of this is when animation first creeps into the film and, when it does, it is moment akin to the first time one sees The Wizard of Oz and it transitions from black and white to color. And that song is one of Disney’s legendary earworms, and still popular today. I guess everybody somehow forgot which movie it is from.
Unfortunately, there is a less animation here than I expected. Aside from a brief bit at the end, it is restricted to illustrating three stories Baskett tells. I was surprised by the separate directing credits for animation and “photoplay”. Really, there’s two kinds of films here and they aren’t as integrated well enough to be successful, which I guess one could also say about society in the south at that time.
To the detriment of the film, most of the runtime is spent with the live actors. Set in the south before the Civil War, there’s a queasy nostalgia for those plantation days. It may show Driscoll playing with a Black child (Glenn Leedy), but that is only after Leedy has brought a jug of water up to the other’s room as one of his chores around the mansion.
There’s an irony to the white people being those in power, when their characters are so shallow here and their performances are so cardboard stiff. And their story is melodramatic crap, largely concerning Driscoll’s unhappiness that his father has left him and his mother at her mother’s. Top-billed Ruth Warrick is Driscoll’s mother, but she isn’t in the film all that much and her time on screen isn’t that memorable. I know Baskett could not possibly be the main star in a film of that age, but it’s still a shame he isn’t.
Song of the South is not a lost masterpiece, but it is a shame it has been effectively removed from public view. Though the film could use more animation, what is here is an important part of that medium’s history. Even worse, in a film pulled from circulation because of its racial matter, the public has been denied the opportunity to see a stellar performance by a Black actor.
Dir: Harvey Foster (teleplay), Wilfred Jackson (cartoon)
Starring James Baskett (and I will die on that hill to protect that billing), Bobby Driscoll
Watched on [REDACTED] blu-ray