Animation Artifacts 10 Jun 2006 07:59 am
Song of the South Music
- To continue with the graphics on sheet music, the music for Song of The South, in the 1940′s wasn’t quite as dynamic as the one I posted yesterday, Der Fuehrer’s Face.
This cover tries to capture the lyrical, romantic feel of the film. Here surrounding the live-action plantation, with all the different songtitles available from the film in the sky, is a border consisting of the animated characters from the film. The colors are limited to the green-etched homestead and the brown-linear characters.
The back cover of the sheet music contains a shot of the live-action characters, James Baskett, Bobby Driscoll, and Luana Patten. All are colored in the same brown ink as the cover’s line art.
(Click on images to enlarge.)
That year “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah“, also from this film, won the Oscar, while the music, itself, was nominated for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture.
This film made quite an impression on me when I was a kid. And this song was one of the two I played over and over from the record. I also loved “Laughing Place”. It’s something of a shame that the film has been kept out of circulation in the US. I can’t imagine that the film affected me as a child in any negative way. Uncle Remus was clearly the hero of the film and the only truly positive adult character in the film.
The last time I saw the film projected was back in the 70′s when Disney set themselves up at Lincoln Center to show a complete retrospective of ALL their films. At the library auditorium behind Lincoln Center there were a number of seminars in which Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Ken Andersen and Woolie Reitherman talked about their work.
I remember Frank Thomas talking about this feature, saying that Disney only did the best for the film hiring the greatest cinemaphotographer, Gregg Toland, to shoot it. He’d shot everything from Citizen Kane to The Grapes of Wrath. (Both are unbelievably stunning works of cinematographic art.) What Thomas didn’t say, or didn’t realize, was that this was Toland’s first COLOR feature. And it showed. Garish, cartoon colors flooded the screen, with actors wearing much too much makeup. A big step for Toland but not the best photography.
Still, I remember those colors vividly, and I would love to see it again – on screen. A dvd would do.
on 10 Jun 2006 at 11:58 am 1.Mark Mayerson said …
“Sooner or Later” was sung in the film by Hattie McDaniel. She performs the song in a relaxed manner that’s wonderful. It’s a shame that her performance and James Baskett’s are being kept from the public.
A small correction. Arthur Miller shot How Green Was My Valley. Toland shot Ford’s Grapes of Wrath. And the same year that he shot Song of the South, Toland also shot The Best Years of Our Lives, directed by Wyler.
on 10 Jun 2006 at 12:40 pm 2.Michael said …
My error, obviously. I’ve corrected it in the original. For those who haven’t seen the change, I stupidly put How Green Was My Valley as one of Gregg Toland’s films. I didn’t check it, and I thank Mark for catching it.
Toland has photographed many of my favorite films. I’ve seen The Best Years of Our Lives at least 50 times and am hooked whenever I cue into it on tv midstream. His early uncredited work on Queen Kelly is also beautiful. This, of course, is the film where Gloria Swanson fired Erich von Stroheim.