Combinations of the two mediums date back to the silent era. It wasn’t Disney’s first live-action/animation hybrid either. For one thing, it’s set after the Civil War, not the antebellum era. There are some misconceptions about Song of the South, and some context surrounding its production, that often get left out of the story. until 2001), and no home video release is officially available in the American market, although bootleg copies abound.
Disney declared the film “retired” as far back as 1970 (although they continued to re-release it as recently as 1986 to promote Splash Mountain, and it even aired on the Disney Channel in the U.S. Even a casual fan could have guessed that Song of the South (1946) would be on this list, and why it isn’t on Disney+. The best the studio could manage was package features – a few short pieces collected under some unifying pretext, more handsomely animated than the average Mickey Mouse short but nowhere near the level of a Fantasia.įrom the inexplicable to the readily explicable. When the war had passed, the money and talent needed for a production on the scale Walt once envisioned wasn’t there anymore. An animator’s strike and World War II eroded personnel and morale, and the Disney studio only survived the war on government contracts. His first three pictures of the decade would indeed come to be renowned as some of the greatest animated films of all time, but in their initial release, Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi all lost money – money Walt desperately needed, since he had spent all the profits from Snow White on their production, on staff expansion, and on a new Burbank studio. Riding high off his successes in the previous decade, culminating in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he entered the 40s with high hopes and daring ambitions for what animation could do as an art form.
The 1940s were a creative and financial low point for Walt Disney.
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