Disney/Pixar In General

The live action parts of Song of the South are pretty cringe-worthy, but there's no reason the animated parts can't come back some day.

Edited by Weirdguy149 on Nov 23rd 2022 at 5:37:14 AM

It's been 3000 years…

The animated characters from Song of the South occasionally appeared at Disneyland during Long Lost Friends week, as seen at 2:33 here.

Is that like an entire week for more obscure characters? Cool.

There was another Brer Rabbit animated film, incidentally. Tad Stones directed one a long while back, with an all-black cast. (I've never seen it. Don't ask me if it's any good.)

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."

There's also Coonskin, which is a very... different take on the Brer Rabbit stories.

But Coonskin is pretty much a parody/response/I don't know what to call it of Song Of The South, replacing the bucolic plantation setting with gritty 70s Harlem and the little boy with a bunch of guys breaking out of jail.

That is, you have to know the earlier film to know what Bakshi was doing there.

Edited by Aldo930 on Nov 23rd 2022 at 4:01:25 AM

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."

@Hamburger Time: The stories haven't vanished, but they are a lot less well-known today than in times past. I don't think that has anything to do with Disney, really, so much as difficulty approaching them as the culture has changed.

I'm old enough that I remember seeing Song of the South the last time Disney released it in theaters in the 80's. It's treatment of race is bad, but I personally don't think it really rises above the level of cringey and patronizing (by which I mean I don't think it's hateful and/or malicious). The live-action story, aside from being where all the cringey patronizing bits are, isn't actually even all that interesting, but the animated segments are great.

I know Disney followed Song of the South with another live-action/animated hybrid, So Dear to My Heart (which hardly ever gets mentioned by anybody). They intended both Treasure Island and Alice in Wonderland to be live-action/ animation hybrids as well, and both would have followed the same formula as Song of the South and So Dear to My Heart of having the animated segments illustrate some point in the main plot. In Treasure Island, Long John Silver was going to tell Jim stories about Reynard the Fox (the design work for these never-used segments was later repurposed for Robin Hood), and Alice was going to be about the importance of whimsey, with silent film star Harold Lloyd as Alice's uptight tutor.

Edited by Robbery on Nov 23rd 2022 at 9:07:47 AM

I remember seeing that film once as a kid but don't remember squat from it.

With all the memes about women choosing a bear over a man, Hollywood might wanna get on an 'East of the Sun and West of the Moon' adaptation

Yeah, the big, awful irony of the B'rer Rabbit stories and how they've been minimized is that the stories never belonged to the people who made them a problem.

African Americans are basically being told their own folk stories are wrong, because prejudiced people appropriated those stories and utilized them in a vehicle for Southern revisionism, and now the stories are used as the scapegoat for those communities' subsequent guilt.

It'd sting less if B'rer Rabbit wasn't still to date the only time Disney ever adapted an African or African American story (well, they also did John Henry, but they never really completed it). And as much as I love Princess and the Frog, I can't really ignore that it's a Russian story dolled up with African American characters, written and directed by white creators with only a single African American in the writers room, pushed nevertheless as Disney's big black representation story.

But that turned into a bit more of Huey Freeman rant than I was really intending.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Nov 23rd 2022 at 9:21:44 AM

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Is there anything that could be considered objectionable in Song of the South’s animated segments that would prevent them from just cutting out all of the live action bits and releasing if like that?

Though I’m not entirely sure how they’d market it or whether it’d actually sell.

Oh God! Natural light!

I was just wondering what the content of that post reminded me of, and then you said Huey Freeman and I was like "damn, that's exactly it".

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Nov 23rd 2022 at 12:04:54 PM

Theoretically they could release the animated segments on their own. But to do so would be to admit that the other live action parts exist, and Disney is nothing if not image conscious. To allow just a peek in the closet is to admit a skeleton lies inside.

Which is kind of silly, if you ask me - the fact they have skeletons is no secret, and “we made a rather racist movie once” is hardly the worst thing they could admit to, considering that this is neither the most racist movie ever nor the worst thing Disney has ever done.

Oh God! Natural light!

There's a rather obscure adaptation of the Uncle Remus tales from Hungary, made in 1967, where the animal characters are hand puppets, and Uncle Remus himself is a Hungarian actor in blackface makeup. It's quite charming apart from the whole blackface thing (which was done out of necessity as the country had hardly any black citizens back then, but I can see how modern viewers may find it insulting). It can be viewed here, though it's in Hungarian with no subtitles.

Uh oh: "So it has just come out that Strange World, the newest Disney picture has scored a never-before-seen-for-Disney grade of B. To put it in perspective, Of the 30 Walt Disney Animation Studios films that have gotten a Cinemascore grade, no Disney movie in its history since Cinemascore existed has scored less than A-. Yes, this includes Home on the Range and Chicken Little."

https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/z3bhej/strange_world_earns_a_b_cinemascore/

Edited by lalalei2001 on Nov 24th 2022 at 9:26:56 AM

The Protomen enhanced my life.

B ain't so bad.

You can't kill art.

The comments mention that Eternals and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice are other movies that got a B.

The big thing from what I understand is very few animated movies get so 'low' a rank, with others including the Emoji Movie and Mars needs Moms.

Edited by lalalei2001 on Nov 24th 2022 at 10:27:56 AM

The Protomen enhanced my life.

That's a very bad sign. Any justification why it got that score?

I'm a bit late, but I've seen Song of the South.

Outside the animated bits, it's incredibly boring. It's really slow and dry and has very, very little momentum and, to be honest, it's probably less racist than Gone With the Wind.

I think the fact that it's just not very good is a big part of the equation for Disney. If they put it out again, it'd get attention for like a week, then everyone would just kinda go "that's it? The animated bits are good, but everything else is really bland."

Like, Disney keeps around other stuff that's...problematic in part because people actually really like the movie in question. Peter Pan's got a shockingly racist song in the middle of it (What Makes the Red Man Red) and that still gets released, for example. And 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea has the Pacific Islanders who are pretty yikes. But Disney doesn't bury either of those because there's been consistent demand for them, demand that doesn't exist for Song of the South.

The critic consensus seems to be that it actually handles the representation stuff well and it looks great, but it doesn't really do anything new or surprising. IMO, if it does actually have a well done gay character in it, that might explain the cinemascore.

Edited by Zendervai on Nov 24th 2022 at 10:46:13 AM

Not Three Laws compliant.

So, it's a movie that's good to look at and to like some characters but has a stock plot if that's what you mean.

And in that case... Guess I won't trust Cinemascore too much.

Edited by LoneCourier0 on Nov 24th 2022 at 4:50:42 PM

You can't kill art.

They were still releasing it to theaters well into the 80s, and using clips from it into the early 90s, though. Someone must have been demanding it up until then.

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."

People liked the animated bits, and Disney was rereleasing basically everything they had in theatres periodically until the mid-80s. They rereleased Pete's Dragon multiple times and that movie just straight up sucks.

I think the 80s is when the complaints about the racism started to get impossible to ignore and, well, Song of the South isn't very good so throwing it under the bus to appease the NAACP and other groups while keeping the classic animated stuff that also has bluntly racist shit in it around is a pretty corporate approach to things. (I would not be surprised if the Song of the South rereleases didn't do very well)

Edited by Zendervai on Nov 24th 2022 at 10:56:20 AM

Not Three Laws compliant.

Saw Strange World yesterday. It's decent; I can describe it as basically Disney's version of Avatar, where it mostly exists to show off this amazing imagined world but the actual story is seen-it-a-million times. Like, I was able to peg Lucy Liu's character as the true "villain" from the moment I saw her.

Still, worse than Home on the Range?!?!? Ahahahaha NO.

And yes, Ethan is pretty great. Between him and the Commander from Lightyear Disney is, dare I say it, actually making progress here?

Cinemascore is generally okay, but there's a bunch of factors that make it kinda unreliable (in entirely reasonable ways). Like, a lot of people score kids movies by how entertained their kids were, which skews the results in odd ways. Or a movie that's really good but really unpleasant in some way will get a lower score because...well, it was good but unpleasant. Like, Annihilation got rave reviews, but a C score because it's not an enjoyable movie even if it's a really good movie.

Not Three Laws compliant.