Walt Disney's 1946 classic Song of the South is one of the few exceptions to the adage the book is better than the movie. This is because dialect is so difficult to read, but it is readily understood verbally. The book that the film is based on is called Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings, written by Joel Chandler Harris in the aftermath of the War Between the States. Tales about animals, resembling Aesops Fables are told by a kindly old slave named Remus. The main character of many of the tales is the stealthy and cunning and many times violent Brer Rabbit. Folklorists have demonstrated that the tales are authentic African American tales that were passed on orally on the plantations of the Old South. Many, they believe, have African origins. Harris himself confessed that he did not add or subtract anything from the slave tales, as they were transmitted to him by old slaves during his youth. To the enslaved African-American hearers of Uncle Remus' tales, the rabbit provided an acceptable outlet for the overwhelming hostility which would lead to self destruction if openly expressed. By the same token, it was impossible for Brer Rabbit tales to be printed or told publicly in the South until after emancipation .

Brer Rabbit is black from his head to his tale. His tales document one revolutionary turn of events after another. The world of superior force is undermined, but so is the notion that the meek shall inherit the earth; cunning often results in victory, but the trickster can also be tricked. Brer Rabbit exhibits the revolutionary consciousness that is necessary to survive in an oppressive system. He suggests that no order can be depended on for very long, that there are no certainties that goodness may win this week and power the next. What is certain is the need to improvise, hang loose, stay cool, avoid sticky situations, avoid rigid interpretations of events. Brer Rabbit shows that anarchy undermines all systems which mask reality. His lessons inculcate a revolutionary consciousness because they teach that no one ever needs to accept limitations on the self. While Brer Rabbit may hate, he does not hate life. In fact he glories in its manifold possibilities and its possibilities for reversal.

All of this was made acceptable to the white Southern audiences of the 1870's and the 1940's by the fact that while Brer Rabbit is often violent and hateful, his narrator, Uncle Remus the slave, is always loving, kind and docile. This is the very reason that Song of the South was banned in the 1960's. It was no longer acceptable to portray a kindly docile "darkey." Audiences of such sensibilities would do well to remember that Brer Rabbit is bigger than his narrator.

The Brer Rabbit tales are essentially an outlet of slave society that needed a way of overturning the antihuman structure of the slave system. They also possess a universal quality in that they offer a release for all of us who from time to time feel oppressed and that there are limits placed upon us. In reconstruction America, the closest analogy to slavery was children surrounded by an adult world of unrelenting authority, thus the popularity of Uncle Remus among white children. His tales were in Mark Twain's words the oracle of the nation's nurseries. After 35 years of immense popularity among American children, President Theodore Roosevelt remarked to Joel Chandler Harris, "Presidents may come and presidents may go, but Uncle Remus stays put!" Unfortunately, since the 1960's, Song of the South has not stayed put. We have in many ways come full circle. We have returned to the days when Brer Rabbit tales may not be told. Since the mid-1960's Song of the South has been suppressed by the shrill unthinking voices whose knee jerk reactions of suppression are, more often than not, based on their own prejudices rather than some actual racist theme in the film that they suppress. Now, due to the democratic nature of the internet, you are actually able to obtain digitally re-mastered videos and DVDs of the film and products related to the film!!!