Song of the South

In 1946, Walt Disney released an early feature film titled “The Song of the South.” It won an Oscar and was the first time that Walt Disney films featured a black in a staring role. The picture was re-released on several occasions since but has, in effect, been “retired” because of its controversial nature. The origin and inspiration for the film dates to the immediate post-Civil War South when a journalist named Joel Chandler Harris invented a character named Uncle Remus and incorporated a series of folk tales which anthropormorfised animals.

Your assignment is to compare that film to the article on the Web Page, “Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit” by Bernard Wolfe. Answer the following questions:

1. To what extent does the film complement the thesis set forth by the author of the article and to what extent does it deviate from that thesis?

2. Is the film “Song of the South” racist as has been alleged? If so, was Joel Chandler Harris racist?

3. What precisely was the first critique of the film by the NAACP?

4. Define “racist” as objectively as you can so that one can “know it when they see it.”

Oh, a good place to survey the film is on the following link:

http://www.songofthesouth.net/movie/index.html