treading very carefully
There was a thread like this before that became very controvercial and heated, so I'm going to be very careful here...
The movie was never officially banned, but The Walt Disney Company has chosen not to screen it for a very long time, and has chosen not to release it to DVD. The raesons are very complicated, but here's part of it:
The setting of the film was the deep south sometime soon after the Civil War. Walt Disney was very careful to be sure that all the live action characters, especially the black characters, were portrayed in a very dignified way. Unfortunately, some people assumed that Disney was portraying black people who lived in that time as happy. Black people had it very hard then, and portraying them as happy was considered inappropriate. Also there was no title at the beginning of the film to tell people what year the story takes place in, so some people assumed that it took place before the Civil War, and that it was portraying people happy to be slaves, which is even worse.
Also, the folksy ways that some of the characters have and the slang that they use can rankle modern viewers. Some see it as portraying the people as ignorant. So in spite of Disney's best efforts, some people find the movie offensive. That's why The Walt Disney Company has chosen not to show it.
|