Well, of course it's based on the folklore. He didn't just imagine it out of thin air. Your quibble is with the extent it matches some specific piece of folklore told by a specific person at a specific time - because every time a story gets told, it's different.
The criticisms made of the film today are largely the same as those made in 1946.
It’s not, though. If it was based on the actual African tales, the names of the characters would be different. And there would be no Uncle Remus, a character Joel Chandler Harris made up himself. We also wouldn’t be having fans encouraging Disney to go back to the drawing board and consult African folklorists for something more authentic…because they wouldn’t have to if it was actually authentic to the African folklore. Song of the South is based on The Uncle Remus Tales by Joel Chandler Harris, not the African folklore.
Clueless (1995) is based on Jane Austen's Emma. Just because the main character is named Cher and it's set in the 90's doesn't somehow invalidate that.
Not to mention the original African folklore may not have originated in Africa.
And Song of the South is based on Joel Chandler Harris’ The Uncle Remus Tales. We can keep going in circles. Sure, we can keep going back and back and back, but the bottom line is Walt Disney did not consult African folklorists for Song of the South. He consulted The Uncle Remus Tales, something that is separate from the African tales, an appropriated version/spin on tales that Joel Chandler Harris listened to on the plantation.
Yes, but in the '40s almost everyone met those criticisms with "well, that's absurd" and then they went and gave the lead actor an Academy Award.
Uncle Remus is the person in the film telling the folklore to the children. He's the narrating convention; of course he's not actually also contained within the folklore. They aren't first-person stories.
He is a character created by Joel Chandler Harris. He is in the film because Walt Disney based the film on The Uncle Remus Tales, written by Joel Chandler Harris…where Uncle Remus appears.
... and what is The Uncle Remus Tales, written by Joel Chandler Harris, based on?
Actually, far from being dismissed by “everyone”, the criticisms were quite extensively voiced, and almost all of them centred on the unfortunate romanticisation of plantation life. It should tell us something that people were already pointing to the film’s problematic aspects almost 80 years ago now.
Right. And regarding the Academy Award, it was an honorary one. It’s not like Baskett won an Oscar for Best Actor/Supporting Actor, which still has nothing to do with the criticisms of the film at the time.
Stuff he made up, Uncle Remus included.
That's its sin?
I think it's fair to say the Joel Chandler Harris stories are based on African folklore, but distorted and filtered through a white man's perspective. Brer Rabbit has traces in African folklore, but Uncle Remus himself is 100% a Harris invention — and a racist one at that.
The Uncle Remus Tales are appropriated stories that JCH heard from black American slaves on a plantation. We have little to no evidence, for obvious reasons, that what he heard was, one, 100% authentic and exactly, word-for-word, what he copied directly from the slaves, and two, that what he heard was even authentic to the African stories themselves and not something that was distorted and changed over time. Given that slaves had been away from the Mother Land for centuries at that point, something like that happening isn’t far-fetched and is highly likely to have happened.
They were voiced and dismissed. The Academy considered them so hard that they gave the film multiple Academy Awards. The movie-going public considered them and decided to purchase twice as many tickets to the film as any other movie released that year. The future-movie-going public cared so much about the criticisms that it was re-released four or five times over the next four decades.
