The Disney characters too racist to return
Tim Burton’s Dumbo – which opened on Friday to decidedly mixed reviews – is nearly twice as long as Disney’s 1941 classic, but there’s one set of characters you won’t find reproduced even for a nanosecond of screen time: the crows. Appearing in the original’s last 10 minutes or so, this jivetalking, openly stereotyped quintet (who sing When I See an Elephant Fly) can’t be comfortably made over to placate modern sensibilities.
The leader of the pack, puffing his chest out and clutching a cigar in his wing, is a whole checklist of affronts to African-Americans. He’s called Jim Crow – a glib nod towards America’s still-extant segregation laws of that name. To add insult to injury, he’s voiced by a white actor, Cliff Edwards – the same guy who did
Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio – so the general veneer of minstrelsy is compounded by what you might call “black-voice”.
Disney’s lack of racial sensitivity in this era – and for a long time past it – is well-trodden ground. Well into the Eighties and Nineties, when the studio’s Renaissance began with The
Little Mermaid (1989), there are still very dubious racial caricatures to contend with, almost all of them sidekicks. There was that film’s crab, Sebastian, with his heavy Jamaican accent, but also two passing characters in Under the Sea – the fluke (“[he’s] the duke of Soul, yeah”), who looks like an old black jazz player, and the briefly glimpsed black fish (“she sings”), who has massive red lips.
Much like the crows, these minor players are mainly wheeled on for musical and/or background colour, which could also be said of the Native Americans in Peter Pan (1953), with their wildly exaggerated terracotta features and thoroughly not-cool signature song What Makes the Red Man Red? Or take the Siamese cats, passim in Disney, popping up with devious-looking slanted eyes, buck teeth and some form of Engrish to impart – that evil pair in Lady and the Tramp (1955), for instance, or the one playing the piano in The Aristocats (1977), who sings “Shanghai, Hong Kong, egg foo young! Fortune cookie always wrong!”, puts a cymbal on his head, and quips “Boy, he brew it!” when Berlioz plays the trumpet. It’s a wonder they didn’t get Mickey Rooney to voice him.
Some racist manoeuvres in Disney are more insidious. Aladdin’s skin colour is much lighter in the 1992 film than any of the Arab villains of the piece. And alas, The Lion King (1994) is premised on troublesome plotting about lion supremacy – the film can’t allow those cackling, dark-skinned hyenas, voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin, to desecrate the Pride Lands, which must be kept clean of their taint. True, James Earl Jones voiced the lions’ patriarch, Mufasa, but in a stentorian, near-Shakespearian manner, where the hyenas got street dialect.
Walt Disney’s influence on the brand cast a long shadow. It’s no wonder rumours of his own racist proclivities have swirled around, given the plentiful evidence on screen. Meryl Streep called him “a hideous anti-Semite” in 2014. At the very least, he kept poor company, inviting the Nazi director Leni Riefenstahl for a studio visit in 1938, a month after Kristallnacht. It was an overworked Disney animator, meanwhile, who coined the studio’s least PR-friendly nickname “Mauschwitz”.
The locus classicus for Disney’s dodgy racial messaging will always be
Song of the South, the studio’s semianimated 1946 feature, lovingly overseen by Walt himself, which was an enormous hit in its day, but has never received any kind of home entertainment release. It’s not hard to see why. Set in a bumptious Dixieland during Reconstruction, it has a former slave called Uncle Remus singing tales of the good old days to the seven-yearold white boy visiting his grandma’s plantation. The black actor playing Remus, James Baskett, won an honorary Oscar for the role, and Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah won Best Song. But Baskett couldn’t attend the premiere of the film in Atlanta, because the city was still under segregation laws. And though Uncle Walt was keen to seek the approval of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in a general spirit of meaning well, he didn’t exactly get it. A telegram the association sent to the press in 1946 regretted the film’s “dangerously glorified picture of slavery” and criticised its “impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship”.
Almost the whole of Disney’s back catalogue is coming back at us in slick updates such as the new Dumbo, but don’t hold your breath for a Song of the South remake anytime soon. Meanwhile, although Jon Favreau’s forthcoming The Lion King aims to honour the African setting with its largely black-voice cast, how it handles those pesky hyenas could be the next litmus test for just how seriously Disney is cleaning up its legacy.
The jivetalking crows in the original ‘Dumbo’ don’t appear for even a nanosecond in the new one