If Disney had truly understood the message of the tales he animated so delightfully, he would have realized the extent of distortion of the frame story. In the world that Disney made, the Blacks sublimate their own lives in order to be better servants to the white family. When Johnny’s mother threatens to keep her son away from the old gentleman’s cabin, Uncle Remus is so hurt that he starts to run away. Thus Blacks on the plantation are seen as willingly subservient to the whites to the extent that they overlook the needs of their own children. When Toby and Johnny are with Uncle Remus, the gray-haired Black man directs most of his attention to the white child. Toby is good enough to catch frogs with, but not good enough to have birthday cake with. Although Johnny coaxes his mother into inviting Ginny to his fancy birthday party at the big house, Toby is curiously absent from the party scenes.
The boys befriend a little blond girl, Ginny, whose family clearly represents the neighborhood’s white trash. He is up before Johnny in the morning in order to bring his white charge water to wash with and keep him entertained. The African-American adults in the film pay attention to him only when he neglects his responsibilities as Johnny’s playmate-keeper. Although Toby makes one reference to his “ma,” his parents are nowhere to be seen. An obviously ill-kept Black child of the same age named Toby is assigned to look after the white boy, Johnny. Kind old Uncle Remus caters to the needs of the young white boy whose father has inexplicably left him and his mother at the plantation. Joel Chandler Harris set his stories in the post-slavery era, but Disney’s version seems to take place during a surreal time when Blacks lived on slave 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. They provided no indication regarding the status of the Blacks on the plantation. Disney and company made no attempt to to render the music in the style of the spirituals and work songs that would have been sung during this era. The days on the plantation located in “the United States of Georgia” begin and end with unsupervised Blacks singing songs about their wonderful home as they march to and from the fields. Turner wrote:ĭisney’s 20th century re-creation of Harris’s frame story is much more heinous than the original. The film has been criticized both for “making slavery appear pleasant” and “pretending slavery didn’t exist,” even though the film (like Harris’ original collection of stories) is set after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Although some Blacks have always been uneasy about the minstrel tradition of the Uncle Remus stories, the major objections to Song of the South have had to do with the live-action portions. Song of the South consists of animated sequences featuring Uncle Remus characters such as Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox, and Br’er Bear, framed by live-action portions in which Uncle Remus (portrayed by actor James Baskett, who won a special Oscar for his efforts) tells the stories to a little white boy upset over his parents’ impending divorce. Harris’s Uncle Remus was a fictitious old slave and philosopher who told entertaining fables about Br’er Rabbit and other woodland creatures in a Southern Black dialect. These stories - many of which Harris learned from an old Black man he called “Uncle George” - were first published as columns in the Atlanta Constitution and were later syndicated nationwide and published in book form. Harris, who had grown up in Georgia during the Civil War, spent a lifetime compiling and publishing the tales told to him by former slaves. Song of the South, a 1946 Disney film mixing animation and live action, was based on the “Uncle Remus” stories of Joel Chandler Harris.