Disney's Most Notorious Film (36 page)

In both of these films, the intensity of
Song of the South
’s original controversies slowly dissipates.
Fletch Lives
was an apolitical pastiche of the old Disney film and Hollywood’s representation of the South in general. As such, it failed to mount a coherent critique of the era’s racial politics. If anything, it ultimately took the problematic position that race did not matter. Even the extremist KKK members are portrayed comically in the film—too stupid and incompetent to be any real threat. Like
Vacation
,
Fletch
presents an apolitical kind of populism that serves as a default form of conservatism because it fails to criticize that which it imitates (Disney’s idyllic vision of the American South). As with Reaganist responses to
Song of the South
during the same decade, these carefully apolitical nods to the Disney film ultimately work to reinforce the
everyday
,
evasive
ubiquity of whiteness. The musical sequence, where the emphasis is on using white performers to avoid any racial connotation about the history of the South, just reinscribes whiteness as the norm. At the end of the film, Fletch tricks another man back in L.A. into taking the worthless Mississippi property. Fletch pretends to be heartbroken, saying
he was “born and raised in a briar patch.” At this point,
Fletch Lives
references
Song of the South
again, but it also invokes a subtler truth. Fletch’s deception fits the reference to Brer Rabbit, who repeatedly lied and tricked Brer Fox. But Fletch’s own kinship with Brer Rabbit also echoed one of the criticisms of
Song of the South
. The lessons of Brer Rabbit were no longer about the physical and emotional survival of African Americans in racially hostile climates. Instead, they were for privileged white children to learn how to trick less-privileged white children to their advantage.

WHO (RE)FRAMED BRER RABBIT?

Two years after
Song of the South
was rereleased for the final time, Touchstone co-released with Amblin Entertainment the cartoon noir
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
. Another landmark in hybrid animation,
Roger Rabbit
is the story of a fictional animated star, “Roger Rabbit,” who is framed for the murder of a man thought to be having an affair with his wife, Jessica Rabbit. Roger is a mix of Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and Oswald the Rabbit. In this alternate history of classic Hollywood, all the stars of animated cartoons are actually actors who coexist in Southern California with real people, but are largely segregated to the
“Toontown”
neighborhood.
Roger Rabbit
is set in 1947, one year after
Song of the South
debuted. Also a hybrid of animation and live action, the later film—budgeted at the considerable cost of $50 million
⁵⁴
—was every bit as innovative for its time as
Song of the South
had been forty years earlier.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit
was a who’s who of classic Hollywood cartoons, including even Brer Bear (far left).

The film’s release prompted many references in the press to the earlier Disney film. Journalists and critics positioned
Roger Rabbit
within a long historical timeline of technological innovation and achievement that began with Max Fleischer’s
Out of the Inkwell
series and Disney’s
Alice’s Wonderland
, followed decades later by
The Three Caballeros
(1944),
Anchors Aweigh
(1945), and
Song of the South
(1946), where “as Uncle Remus, James Baskett seemed to walk into a cartoon world.”
⁵⁵
Such a technological correlation between the two films, centered on groundbreaking advances in the blending of live action and animation, was apparent enough. Yet the link was not only a matter of mutual industrial innovation. Featuring an “all-star” cast of Hollywood’s animation legends (Disney, Warner Bros., Fleischer),
Roger Rabbit
also included direct
Song of the South
cameos—Brer Bear appears in two separate scenes, along with the singing moles from “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” and—in a split-second shot late in the film—the infamous “Tar Baby” (who holds a sign that reads “Visit La Brea Tar Pits,” a silly non sequitur that deflects potential controversy through winking humor).

Of course, the fantastical pastiche of characters and Hollywood history in
Roger Rabbit
was not an exception to the rule, but rather a typical
attempt
to expand Disney’s narrative landscape across various texts. The subtle reappearances of characters in
Roger Rabbit
suggests an earlier instance of “transmedia storytelling”—Henry Jenkins’s notion for how preexisting diegetic spaces spill over into additional media texts. Indeed, every character here (Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and so forth) is expanding their narrative canvas via their presence in this film. The extent of this transmedia migration was reinforced less than five years later, when
Roger Rabbit
’s “Toontown” debuted as a new themed section of California’s Disneyland, giving physical embodiment to the film’s fictional “ghetto.” Toontown’s centerpiece attractions are Mickey Mouse’s own home and a ride featuring Roger Rabbit. The narrative world of
Roger
Rabbit
literally links up spatially with
Song of the South
’s Splash Mountain, built only a few hundred yards away. In a circular transmedia pattern,
Song of the South
characters exist in
Roger Rabbit
, which exists in Disneyland as “Mickey’s Toontown,” which then links back up, across Frontierland and into Critter Country, to Splash Mountain.

A very brief shot of the Tar Baby in the “Toontown” sequence of
Roger Rabbit
, obscured behind the window of Eddie Valiant’s car. His sign reads “Visit La Brea Tar Pits.”

The “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” moles in
Roger Rabbit
.

Another distant sighting of Brer Bear in
Roger Rabbit
, as he walks up the road in the distance.

As I have noted throughout, these acts of corporate convergence are never politically, economically, or culturally neutral. Patricia Turner has explored explicitly the problematic representation of race in
Roger Rabbit
and
Song of the South
. In
Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies
, Turner critiqued
Song of the South
as part of a larger chapter on Disney’s damaging representations of race, articulating academic criticisms of the film common during the 1980s and early 1990s. While not discussing the presence of
Song of the South
’s characters in
Roger Rabbit
, she drew a comparison between the two landmark achievements. “Brer Rabbit was not the last hare to command center stage in a Disney-related production . . . ,” she wrote. “Both productions broke new technological ground in weaving live-action sequences with animated ones.”
⁵⁶
More important, Turner drew out the implicit yet clearly racial subtext of
Roger Rabbit
: “The Los Angeles community imagined by the filmmakers consists of two communities—one human and one animated. It goes without saying that humans are depicted as the superior, dominant population, and the animated characters, the toons, are portrayed as the inferior, subordinate community. In assigning characteristics to depict toon inferiority to the audience, the filmmakers bestowed upon them several attributes traditionally associated with blacks.”
⁵⁷

Turner argued that the “toons” are an idealized minority community—their primary motivation being the entertainment of others, acceptance of their social status, and constant approval of humans to define their own self-worth. She also convincingly shows how Roger Rabbit himself evokes the African American “coon” stereotype—a harmless buffoon who only exists for a laugh. Moreover, “the nightclub where Jessica works as a singer bears strong resemblance to Harlem’s infamous Cotton Club where black performers entertained all-white audiences,” she wrote. “In
Roger Rabbit
, all of the entertainers are toons while all of the patrons are humans.”
⁵⁸
This reading may be overlooking one of the film’s clearest racial signifiers—the use of
Dumbo
’s (1941) racist crows as the jazz band playing behind Jessica Rabbit in the club. This clever insertion, and the larger narrative of segregation, begs the bigger ideological question of whether the filmmakers were aware of the racial histories the film evoked. Was the racial subtext in
Roger Rabbit
the unconscious
by-product
of white privilege (where all nonhumans become conflated into one generic “other”), or was it the result of a subversive sense of historical irony?

A brief, clever reference to Splash Mountain, as Roger Rabbit and Baby Herman go over a steep drop in the short film
Trail Mix-Up
(1993). A bumper sticker on the back of the log reads “We Visited Splash Mountain.”

Roger Rabbit
’s symbolic representation of racial relations is clearly ambivalent. The greatest strength and weakness of Turner’s argument is that she articulates
Roger Rabbit
’s allegory quite acutely—in fact, it’s barely a subtext. Much of the film’s retro-noir is a reference to Roman Polanski’s
Chinatown
(1974), another film about racially segregated neighborhoods.
Roger Rabbit
’s private eye protagonist, Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), is haunted by a tragedy from working a beat in Toontown—“A toon killed my brother.” This satirically echoed the more ambiguous, but more powerful, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” While clearly a reference to ethnic enclaves, “Toontown” is as much “Chinatown” as it is “Watts.” All of this isn’t to suggest that Turner’s argument does not work. It would be foolish to argue that the filmmaker’s intentions were the definitive reading of
Roger Rabbit
. Like
Fletch Lives
, its cultural and historical sense of irony is passive at best. By remaining only an allegory, the symbolic narrative of racial inequality is ultimately tenuous. The film may reward the informed viewer, who appreciates the multiple intertextual references. Yet
Roger Rabbit
could just as easily reinforce issues of white privilege
and
institutional racism with audiences uninformed, or uninterested, in its ironies.