Disney's Most Notorious Film (11 page)

Sammond rejects any overt suggestion that Disney’s accomplishments emerged purely because of creative artistic genius—either his own, or that of the talented animators he employed.
Babes in Tomorrow land
is largely about the construction of the child in popular, as well as specialized and scientific, discourses. Disney, meanwhile, served as only one, albeit crucial, part of the “discursive matrix”
²⁴
surrounding the concept of the child. While he emphasizes that there is no necessary direct or cause-effect correlation between studies of the child and Disney, he does outline preexisting conditions of possibility for Disney’s success in the late 1920s and 1930s. “Without the discourse of movie effects in circulation at that moment,” writes Sammond, “Disney would not have had recourse to this form of address” to naturalized middle-class virtues of deferred gratification, self-denial, thrift, and perseverance.
²⁵
Sammond defines the company as one among many beneficiaries of earlier attempts by activist groups, popular magazines, and child-rearing manuals to exploit newfound concerns around children. Appeals to the child were, and often still are, deployed by adult defenders of Disney to highlight its perceived innocence.

Disney’s products thus were, and are still, targeted toward adults. While its animation may have been geared toward kids,
Song of the South
was reaching for an adult market with its live action melodrama. Originally conceived in the pre–World War II era,
Song of the South
was Disney’s cost-efficient exploitation of popular ’30s cinematic representations of the Old South, such as Bing Crosby’s musicals and
Gone with the Wind
. For nearly three decades,
Gone with the Wind
was by far the biggest Hollywood film. Every film that followed Selznick’s epic was conscious of its success. As the film scholar Molly Haskell recently wrote, “Reading the [original Margaret Mitchell] book and seeing the movie [adaptation] were to my generation interchangeable rites of passage as inevitable as baptism, the first communion, the first date, the first kiss.”
²⁶
Gone with the Wind
was not only the highest-grossing film of all time until the release of
The Godfather
(1972);
²⁷
it had also still grossed, as late as the mid-1950s, nearly
twice
as much as the next highest-grossing film of all time,
The Robe
(1953).
²⁸
Song of the South
was, in a sense, Disney’s
own
adaptation of
Gone with the Wind
, which included casting Hattie McDaniel in a similar role of the maid. “It becomes immediately obvious,” Susan Miller and Greg Rode sarcastically wrote years later, “that Hattie McDaniel . . . has merely lingered at the set for Tara, awaiting another domestically disarranged family.”
²⁹
Song of the South
offered a mixture of the Selznick film’s romance and nostalgia for the imagined Old South with Disney’s distinctive brand of catchy musical tunes and groundbreaking animation. Not coincidentally, 1939 was also the year that Disney began negotiating the rights to the Harris stories.
³⁰
Disney had planned to make the film then, possibly even with Paul Robeson as Uncle Remus,
³¹
but delayed it upon the outbreak of war. This very same war financially saved the company, but it also eventually made the final product that was
Song of the South
even more outdated.

THE DISNEY STUDIOS’ FINANCIAL STRUGGLES

By the 1940s, Disney was heavily dependent on the use of live action to cut costs. Even before World War II, it was clear that animation was not only expensive, but also failed to consistently draw large audiences. For every
Snow White
, there was also a
Fantasia
or
Pinocchio
—films that failed on first release to recoup their costs at the box office. Live action was one way to both minimize such financial risks and produce new films more quickly. The results were films that ranged from self-promotional features like
The Reluctant Dragon
(1941) to documentaries such as
Seal Island
(1948), which were all more live action than animation. This trend essentially continued until the day Walt died three decades later. Largely live action entertainment such as the
Disneyland
TV show or the film
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
(1954) were as big as any cartoons made during this time. Although it had made the company’s reputation, new animated features were very much an afterthought by the time Disney expanded its media offerings in the 1950s and 1960s.

In particular, Disney had refined its familiarity with the use of live action through a variety of World War II propaganda texts, such as
Victory Through Air Power
and the Latin America “Good Neighbor” projects,
Saludos Amigos
and
The Three Caballeros
(1945). The war shifted priorities for Disney, since government contracts kept the company afloat. The U.S. government constituted the bulk of Disney’s funding, rescuing
the
company from considerable creative and financial trouble, often of its own making (e.g.,
Fantasia
,
³²
the strike). During the war, Disney produced everything from domestic propaganda (
Der Fuehrer’s Face
, 1943) to government instructional films. These pro-war and goodwill efforts also solidified Disney’s reputation internationally as a face of the United States.
Saludos Amigos
was intended to strengthen the United States’ image in South America more than it was designed to bring in revenue domestically. This also gave the company’s public persona a more nationalistic connotation on the eve of
Song of the South
, which was its first major project after World War II not tied to the war effort. While the company was afforded creative freedom after the war to pursue its own projects, the government no longer guaranteed these films’ financial bottom line.

At the same time, Disney’s struggles were symptomatic of larger industry woes. Hollywood had been in an economic downturn since the late 1930s—something that war-related film production only postponed. After World War II, meanwhile, “the postwar era soon proved to be the most turbulent and crisis-ridden period in industry history.”
³³
Every Holly wood studio was battling additional union strikes, tightened foreign markets, antitrust lawsuits, and a suburban exodus that caused revenue from downtown theaters to dwindle. Disney was representative, but hardly unique in its postwar struggles. As Christopher Anderson writes, “Disney nearly buried his studio beneath ambitious plans for expansion. With box office disappointments like the costly animated feature
Fantasia
(1940), the closing of foreign markets because of the war, and over-investment in new studio facilities, Disney faced burdensome corporate debts that weighed even more heavily once the banks shut off credit to the studio.”
³⁴

As a result,
Song of the South
came out at a notoriously lean financial, if also innovative, time for the studio. In July 1946, four months before the film’s premiere, production was halted on all feature-length productions, except for the four that were already well underway or nearing completion—
Song of the South
,
Make Mine Music
(1946),
Fun and Fancy Free
(1947), and
So Dear to My Heart
(1948).
³⁵
Also during that summer, the Disney Studios cut 40 percent of its workforce, “because of economic conditions reflecting increased wage demands by union crafts, as well as other inflated costs.”
³⁶
Disney’s reluctance to deal with his recently unionized animators was another reason that live action looked more appealing. Less than a month later, the
New York Times
reported that, after much haggling, Disney eventually reached a compromise
with the Screen Cartoonists Guild to hire back 108 artists, with the sole purpose of completing
Song of the South
and
Fun and Fancy Free
. All other projects were shelved indefinitely.
³⁷
According to articles in both
Variety
and the
New York Times
, Disney was losing considerable money on investments in those films that had yet to see theatrical distribution—all feature-length works that employed both animation and live action.

Such conditions made
Song of the South
’s success all the more crucial. At the time of the premiere, Disney spent considerable money advertising
Song of the South
in
Variety
. This included lavish full-page ads describing promotional strategies for its November 12 debut in Atlanta. Ironically, the trade paper also reported in the very same issue that the studio was in financial trouble and considering “whether it will continue producing the shorts.”
³⁸
That same article noted that “a great deal is expected of ‘
Song of the South
.’
”
³⁹
A month and a half later, the
New York Times
reported that Disney earned a profit of only $199,602 in 1946 because of production costs related to unreleased films. Because so many forthcoming films were now in the distribution pipeline, however, Roy O. Disney reportedly believed that “the years ahead will be the most successful in the company’s history.”
⁴⁰
This prediction ultimately proved true by the mid-to-late 1950s, but was certainly not the case in the late 1940s.

PRODUCTION, TEXTUALITY, AND INCOHERENCE

The conditions for
Song of the South
’s contradictory reception history began with the film itself. According to Neal Gabler, the Disney Studios were well aware of potential controversies around
Song of the South
, even during preproduction. Publicist Vern Caldwell was quoted as saying that “the negro situation is a dangerous one. . . . Between the negro haters and the negro lovers there are many chances to run afoul of situations that could run the gamut.”
⁴¹
The awareness of multiple audiences here reinforced the idea that, from its inception, there was always a certain incoherent mentality attached to the film. Disney wasn’t really sure whom to reach with
Song of the South
or how to reach them. Originally written by a conservative Southerner, Dalton Reymond, the script was later rewritten by an East Coast liberal, Maurice Rapf. In this regard, the script itself reflected a split personality. “One of the reasons
Walt
had hired Rapf to work with Reymond,” writes Gabler, “was to temper what he feared would be Reymond’s white southern slant. Rapf was a minority, a Jew, and an outspoken left-winger, and he himself feared that the film would inevitably be Uncle Tomish. ‘That’s exactly why I want you to work on it,’ Walt told him, ‘because I know that you don’t think I should make the movie. You’re against Uncle Tomism, and you’re a radical.’
”
⁴²
Gabler believes that Rapf gave the film a more liberal sensibility. In contrast, Cripps argues that Rapf’s hiring was an implicit admission by someone within Disney that the original draft was too conservative. But he views the liberal’s role in the film’s preproduction as more a matter of what could have been, rather than something reflected in the final product. In either case, the divergent presence of both Rapf and Reymond, in addition to the input of Walt, Caldwell, and others, explicitly symbolized some sense of the film’s ideological ambiguity.

Such incoherence was also echoed in the hybrid use of live action footage and animation. The lighthearted, whimsical cartoons clash jarringly with the live action melodrama that depicts broken families, racial inequality, and children near death. The affective charge of carefree musical sequences runs counter to the (largely subtextual) harshness of plantation life. These differences were intensified by the fact that each section had a different director—Wilfred Jackson (animation), who had worked on
The Three Caballeros
, and Perce Pearce (live action). Neither of them, meanwhile, had much contact with each other during production. Moreover, the work on the animation itself was fractured. As Michael Barrier noted, several different Disney animators worked separately on drawing and animating the exact same characters.
⁴³
To that extent, Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox were literally incoherent.

The use of live action with animation created as many problems for the storytelling as it did opportunities. For decades prior to
Song of the South
and other hybrid films, Disney’s animation depicted an artificial world with no indexical relation to a photographically real world. This allowed the studio to successfully promote the cartoons as “timeless,” tapping into universal truths. Animated cartoons play a central part in what James Snead would later identify as Disney’s “rhetoric of
harmlessness
,”
⁴⁴
that they were “only” children’s stories set in fantastical, unrealistic environments. Yet the move toward integrating live action footage, while cheaper, was costly in a different sense. Shifting away from animation, from hand-drawn furry creatures to flesh-and-blood actors, the socially constructed “timelessness” of Disney’s characters and worlds became tenuous. As with the racial and sexual controversies surrounding
Saludos Amigos
,
Song of the South
’s hybrid animation drew out this glaring disconnect. The presence of “real” people such as Uncle Remus and other human characters within a sentimental melodrama—which Bosley Crowther of the
New York Times
called the “work of conventional [Hollywood] hacks”
⁴⁵
—scarred the facade of Disney’s perceived universal appeal.

The movie’s setting is similarly incoherent. It is a supposedly post-Reconstruction story set within a seemingly pre–Civil War South. The lack of a clear historical context reiterates how the film could be read either way. As I will discuss in the next chapter, Walter White of the NAACP famously said that
Song of the South
gives “the impression of an idyllic master–slave relationship.”
⁴⁶
Defenders of the film are quick to respond that it does not take place during the era of slavery, but rather after the Civil War. This is true to a point: Uncle Remus is not technically a slave. But he’s not exactly “free” either. While there is no explicit reference to slavery, the narrative offers no clues that would suggest anything
other
than the imaginary space of an idyllic Southern plantation, thereby reinforcing White’s criticism of the film. Precisely because it is so historically and thematically vague,
Song of the South
does give the
impression
of a master–slave relationship, even if it’s not literally a story about slaves.