The Final Appropriation of the Tales

Johnny, Toby, and Ginny are next seen running down a dirt road singing the song they learned from Remus, "Zip-a-dee-do-dah." When they run by Remus, who is picking up what appears to be the same firewood he had carried into the kitchen earlier, the animated characters the old man had only imagined appear for real. This scene, ending with the three children waiting for Remus to join them as they head into an animated horizon, demonstrates the way in which Johnny has appropriated Remus' story-telling and no longer needs him as a mentor or surrogate father. James Snead explains:

The most incisive statement the film makes about Johnny's relationship to Uncle Remus, however, recalls the very process (reminiscent of slavery itself) whereby Harris first and Disney secondly appropriate and then market Uncle Remus' African narratives, without the black bard reaping any benefit from his labors. If Johnny's "black" parent teaches him the content and technique of his storytelling genius, his "white" precursors (Harris and Disney) seem in the end to have taught him the art of usurping and exploiting those stories, for by the ending of the movie Uncle Remus has been made obsolete! We (and Uncle Remus) notice with incredulity that Johnny can now bring the cartoon animals to life independently. As he romps up the hill, we see that he has learned to "tell Uncle Remus Stories" --an art defined in the film as the ability to conjure up cartoons--without blacks. Uncle Remus has, in effect, made himself redundant.⁽¹⁾

It seems Johnny's success in appropriating the tales from Uncle Remus can be attributed to the actions of his real father. When John returns to reclaim his rightful place as the head of the household (in a similar manner to the way Ginny's father returns and straightens out Ginny's older brothers with love and authority earlier in the film), he also claims Remus' dialect for himself. The dialect is as much a part of the myth of the house servant as their loyalty and so, without any distinguishing characteristics, Remus relinquishes his role as both surrogate father and story-teller. If one is looking for the point where this transfer of narrative energy occurs, the clearest moment seems to be the time where Johnny puts his hand in Remus' and wakes up for the first time since getting gored by the bull. In grasping his hand, Johnny makes it clear that he wants Remus to serve as his surrogate father--at least until he realizes that his biological father is in the room.

Although this film met the requirements for mythifying African-American servants, it failed to satisfy almost everything else--including audience members. Alice Walker, a native of Joel Chandler Harris' hometown of Eatonton, Georgia, recalls recognizing that appropriation of the Remus tales from the black storyteller even as a young child in 1946:

Our whole town turned out for this movie: black children and their parents in the colored section, white children and their parents in the white section.

Uncle Remus in the movie saw fit to ignore, basically, his own children and grandchildren in order to pass on our heritage--indeed, our birthright--to patronizing white children who seemed to regard him as a kind of talking teddy bear.
I don't know how old I was when I saw this film--probably eight or nine--but I experienced it as a vast alienation, not only from the likes of Uncle Remus--in whom I saw aspects of my father, my mother, in fact all black people I knew who told these stories--but also from the stories themselves, which, passed into the context of white people's creation, I perceived as meaningless. So there I was, at an early age, separated from my own folk culture by an invention.⁽²⁾

As James Snead notes, Alice Walker wasn't alone in her contempt for this Uncle Remus:

The image of the benign old slave darky--certainly abnormal after the Civil War, and probably also before it--was nothing short of insulting in 1946, a time when blacks returning from service in World War II were just beginning to consolidate their hard-fought gains and agitate for their rightful place in American society. At the film's New York premiere in Times Square, dozens of black and white pickets chanted, "We fought for Uncle Sam, not Uncle Tom," while the NAACP called for a total boycott of the film, and the National Negro Congress called on black people to "run the picture out of the area."⁽³⁾

Susan Miller and George Rode note the constant pressure placed on the film over the years: "The NAACP objected strenuously to these representations before the film was first released in 1946 and at every one of its re-releases in 1956, 1972 (two years after Disney claimed it would never release the film again), 1980, and 1986."⁽⁴⁾

Walt Disney was aware of the political pressure placed on his company with the release of this film and so, he attempted to borrow a trick from the page book of Gone With the Wind. Steven Watts sympathetically this explains in his book, The Magic Kingdom:

Walt Disney stood silently at the center of the controversy engulfing Song of the South. He revealed little about his own racial attitudes, and to this day they remain hard to pin down. He used casually racist language. . . . On the other side of the ledger, however, he wrote a personal letter on January 30, 1948, to Jean Hersholt, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, suggesting that James Baskett be awarded a special Academy Award for his work in Song of the South. Baskett had not only brought to life the "immortal folklore character" of Uncle Remus, Disney argued, but was "a very understanding person and very much the gentleman."⁽⁵⁾

Whether or not Watts recognizes it, both he and his subject are borrowing tricks from Gone With the Wind producer, David O. Selznick. To put Disney "[o]n the other side of the ledger" is borrowing a description about how to treat African-Americans in the adaptation of Mitchell's novel that appeared in Selznick's memo to screenwriter Sidney Howard in January, 1937.

While it is unclear whether this reference to Selznick is intentional, the parallels between Selznick's epic and what Disney is trying to achieve in lobbying the Academy for a special award are clear. When Hattie McDaniel won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, critics of Gone With the Wind were silenced because the positive portrayal of the mammy figure was legitimized by McDaniel's colleagues. It is clear Disney was seeking a similar effect in requesting a special Academy Award. Considering that every white actor from Bobby Driscoll to Ruth Warrick appears ahead of James Baskett in the credits, it seems that if there was any possibility of Baskett earning a legitimate Academy Award (being as legitimate as Academy Awards go), it would be in the Best Supporting Actor category.

Instead, Disney lobbied and received an award for Baskett not so much on the merit of his portrayal as the fact that he seemed to be a decent black guy. While this ploy got the film the award they wanted, it did not silence the critics who have seen fit to decry this film every time it is re-released and are probably the reason behind Disney's failure to ever release Song of the South on home video in the United States.