HOME | DD

MaddKossack115 [2017-06-05 21:08:59 +0000 UTC]

I actually think Nostalgia Chick's review of the movie is spot-on (www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPKxHM… ), in that she DOES stress it isn't racist (well, not deliberately, and only falls in the "Values Dissonance" by accident as time moved on), and that it's only really remembered for the "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" music number because, frankly, the rest of the movie was BORING in comparison, with her siding with the critics claiming the live action segments were mostly hokey, and the animated shorts being mostly on-par with other Disney animation.

I would have preferred some mentions of the racial issues being addressed in a reboot (especially since this is established as being in the post-slavery Reconstruction Era, which doesn't get AS much attention in film history as the Civil War-era South, and arguably had just as many problems dealing with race as the Antebellum South), but I can understand scrapping it due to it coming off as awkward or preachy on the first pass.  I think you could slip in a subtle point that the oral tradition of African-Americans in the South (like the ones Uncle Remus talks about) are basically a way they tried to hold on to their culture after the slave owners basically uprooted them from their homes and literally tore families apart, but I agree ramping up the message to "12 Years a Slave" levels would not be the best way to do that for a Disney film.

Speaking of Re-Imagining films that are MUCH more racially-awkward in hindsight, what do you think of this pitch: "What if "Birth of a Nation" (the 1915 one, not the 2016 film that reappropriated the name) was re-imagined, but deliberately portrayed The Klan as Villain Protagonists who, while given explanations for their turn to hatred, are still shown to be destructive, violent proto-terrorists who turn the South into the Jim Crow-era racial dystopia that lasted until the Civil Rights Movement, and even still lingers in the back of America's consciousness?"

👍: 0 ⏩: 0