Thursday, December 14, 2006
What's Left? - Song Of The South And The Censored Eleven
Every year Disney trickles a couple of their classic animated features out of the "Disney Vault" into nifty DVD collectors sets, ensuring a steady flow of income. But one animated feature hasn't been released, and isn't likely to be any time soon. The film is Song of the South, and the reason is the thorniest of issues in America: race.
Song of the South was originally produced in 1946, following on the heels of Disney's most creative run, the short period which produced Pinnochio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi, and features a mix of live action and animation. The majority of the running time is concerned with Uncle Remus (James Baskett), a kindly old black man living on a plantation who befriends a white child and tells him stories about Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and Brer Bear, characters from African American folklore whose adventures are rendered in animation. Song of the South was actually the first movie I ever saw in the theater (at the drive-in, no less), but I couldn't really tell you much about it from memory. It's not available on video, and Disney has no plans to release it, due to the racial imagery included in the film.
While we can assume that the animated characters have "black" personas, they fall into cartoon archetypes of the Bugs Bunny-style anarchist (Brer Rabbit) being chased by Wile E. Coyote-type predators (Bear and Fox), hinting that these archetypes may even have evolved from these African American folk stories. The most controversial segment involves Brer Fox making a "tar baby," a human form made out of tar that Brer Rabbit gets stuck to. Now, there's nothing particularly offensive about this situation in and of itself, but because the term "tar baby" has been used as a racial epithet, that the stink of racism has attached itself to the story, to the extent that White House press secretary Tony Snow used the term earlier in the year to describe an intractable situation, he was accused of racism.
But most objections to the film seem to be concerned not so much with the animated segments, but with the live action portrayal of life on a post-civil war plantation, where blacks are portrayed as being in heavenly bliss in an environment of explicit racial inequality. "Song of the South not only condones, but goes so far as to romanticize life in the South during Reconstruction," writes Hollis Henry in an essay on The Black Commentator, providing a succinct summary of objections to the film. "Baskett's grin is the worst sadism. It's painted across his face and his face is plastered across almost all the promotional photographs for the movie. Seeing the Remus grin helps to explain every surly snarl in the black ghettos throughout the United States. Seeing Remus's bovine frame convulsing in an estrogen-heavy giggle (they might as well have glued a grey beard on Aunt Jemima) while he sits between Johnny and his friend Jenny, helps to explain the cartoon-like hyper machismo of oily muscles and bulletproof vests popular in Hip Hop culture."
The irony of this is that every first hand account of the film either states or implies that the live action segments are boring, trite and sappy, and hold little appeal to children and less to adults. Had Disney simply done away with the framing device, they may have had both a more entertaining and less offensive film 60 years later.
Speaking of Song of the South inevitably brings up other offensive cartoons of the same period. Cartoon shorts from Warner Bros. and other studios commonly contained racist gags, such as a character receiving blackface from an explosion, then facing the camera to do an Al Jolson impression. Many such gags have been edited out over the years for TV broadcast, but some cartoons are built entirely around racial gags, and have had to be buried in the vaults. The most famous of these are known as The Censored Eleven. Again, there is a mystique around these cartoons because they've been unavailable for so long. Nobody's quite sure just how offensive they may or may not be. The two most famous of these cartoons--Bob Clampett's Coal Black and de Seben Dwarves and Tin Pan Alley Cats--showed up briefly on YouTube earlier this year, before Warner Bros. got wind of them and had them yanked. Certainly they aren't as offensive as Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat, a Walter Lantz cartoon which reached a certain level of notoriety through its inclusion on Rhino Home Video's Weird Cartoons compilation, which depicts the black city of Lazy Town, and an endless series of gags about how lazy black folks are. Nor are they likely as offensive as the cartoons made depicting Japanesees during World War II, which were specifically produced to dehumanize Japanese people (arguably the most offensive gag in Coal Black is the below advertisement for Murder Inc.).
So let's get down to the question: are these cartoons racist? On the one hand, they are unquestionably built upon racial caricatures, but caricature is the language of cartoons. In other words, all cartoons are built around caricatures. Elmer Fudd is caricature of a white guy, as are the hillbillies that chase Bugs Bunny around in Hillbilly Hare. In particular, Tin Pan Alley Cats is built around caricatures of specific jazz musicians, in particular the pianist Fats Waller. Can we really say that every caricature of a black person is automatically racist?
But it's not that simple. We have to look at the context of the time these films were made. In pre-civil rights movement America, the only images of black people in the media were caricatures. Power imbalance affects any relationship, and in an environment where white people had complete control over all media, including cartoons, every portrayal of a minority character becomes suspect.
And, by the same token, can we condemn Disney's efforts to portray a world of racial harmony? It seems likely that Walt Disney had the best, and most progressive, intentions in creating the feature Song of the South to pay tribute to the culture of black America. Can we look back and accuse him for not living up to our modern standards of racial sensitivity in a world where those standards didn't exist?
Again, I find no easy answer. Walt was surely no closet Klansman, but his attitudes seem, at best, to have been condescending. These are complicated issues, and I don't think running away from them--by dismissing the films as either racist propaganda or harmless entertainment--solves anything. This leads us to the next question: should these films be unavailable on DVD? I can find no rational reason why they should be banned. These are films. They are part of Hollywood's history. One has no difficulty finding copies of Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, Gone With the Wind or Triumph of the Will. Are these cartoons any different? Of course not. They are documents from an important time in the development of cinema.
Of course, there is one very important difference: cartoons are, at least in the minds of the public, entertainment aimed at children. I certainly can't argue against banning the racist Looney Tunes from television, where they are beamed uncontrollably into every household. But on DVD they can be contextualized through documentary materials, and presented with historical distance. In fact, Warner Bros. is already moving in this direction with their Golden Collection sets. The current installment of the Golden Collection has a disclaimer on the box announcing that it "is intended for the adult collector and may not be suitable for all children," and a further disclaimer on the screen at the beginning of the discs:
While they haven't released any of the Censored Eleven yet, they are including some of the cartoons that have racist gags in them uncut. I imagine they have more freedom in this matter than Disney, since I don't think kids really watch Looney Tunes much any more. When I was a kid, they were shown on Saturday morning as the Bugs Bunny Roadrunner Show, and every local station ran a program of Warners cartoons sometime between 3 and 5 on weekday afternoons, when kids were hanging around in front of the TV. These days, you might catch some old cartoons on Boomerang, but they're pretty much banished from any other channel anyway.
There's a deeper reason why these films have been buried, I think. It's not just about kids, it's about branding. Disney animation, and to a lesser extent Bugs Bunny and his gang, are not a bunch of individual films, or at least that's not how their corporate parents want us to see them. They represent a brand. Warner Bros. doesn't want people associating Bugs Bunny with racism. They're establishing a lifelong connection to these characters, which they can use to promote any product they produce (remember Michigan J. Frog branding The WB Network?). With Disney, this is especially touchy. Disney's goal is to have the very name of their company be associated with positive childhood experiences. Even if 95% of the people who see it regard Song of the South as a harmless children's story, they don't want to take the chance of associating any bad feelings with the name Disney.
Whether we'll see All This and Rabbit Stew or Jungle Jitters on future editions of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection is unclear. I imagine they'll put it off for a while at least--after all, there's a vast supply of Warners shorts they can choose from. As for Song of the South, I doubt we'll see it on region one DVD in the foreseeable future, but it is available in Japan (or bootlegged on ebay). Strangely, the one place where it has not been erased from history is at the Splash Mountain ride at Disneyland park, which is adorned with the characters of Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear and Brer Fox (though not Uncle Remus).
Further Reading:
Since this topic is so sensitive, I wanted to point the way to some alternate opinions. There are no shortage of positive opinions on Song of the South on the web, starting with those expressed on songofthesouth.net, which includes an in-depth critical analysis of the story (which doesn't actually seem very in-depth). There are also some good articles here and here. On the other side of the fence, the Black Commentator piece I quoted above is an essential read.
Opinions are even more extreme on the short cartoons. To start with, you can see some actual screencaps (quite a lot of them) from Coal Black and Tin Pan Alley Cats at the Classic Cartoon blog (some of which I swiped for this piece). Support for these particular cartoons is very passionate on the animation history forum and on John Kricfalusi's blog. The other end of the spectrum is represented by this piece on Racialicious. It kind of makes me sad that the people in these different forums aren't talking to each other. I have a feeling it might have a mellowing effect on some of their extreme views (John K actually scolds one of his commentators for even bringing up the racial aspects, and the Racialicious writer seems intent on projecting every crime ever committed by the racist, patriarchal military-industrial complex onto Coal Black).
I have found one writer who seems interested in examining these cartoons with some objectivity: Emru Townsend, who has posted a series of racially dated cartoons on the ReFrederator blog. Check out his thoughts on Sinkin in the Bathtub, Jingle Jangle Jungle, All This and Rabbit Stew (one of the Censored Eleven), Little Black Sambo, and Plane Dumb.
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This is the most balanced and well thought out perspective regarding this controversial issue that I have ever encountered. Awesome Chris! I completely agree that the cartoons and clips, no matter how surrounded they are with conflicting perspectives and opinions, have artistic value and historical importance. Their being with held from public archives is akin to a violation of our constitutional rights. Well, it feels like that anyway. :P (There should be an amendment added to cover our ‘freedom of viewing’). These film companies should at least trust the general public’s discernment on the issues, and grant us the freedom to decide for ourselves whether or not they are offensive. And if they are offensive . . . so what. To repress art and opinions because they are offensive is socialistic. In the end, they are only protecting themselves from public outrage. I’m sure the NAACP has its hands all over this ban, in the name of fighting oppression, by using oppression, of course.
Thanks, A. I'm not sure it's "socialistic," since it's not censorship by the government, just private companies making a decision not to distribute their product. But I take your point.