“Controversial” and “Disney” usually don’t go hand in hand. Until now.

Song of the South is a feature film produced by Walt Disney, released on November 12, 1946 by RKO Radio Pictures and based on the Uncle Remus cycle of stories by Joel Chandler Harris. It was Walt Disney’s first live-action film, though it also contains major segments of animation. The live actors provide a sentimental frame story, in which Uncle Remus relates the folk tales of the adventures of Br’er Rabbit and his friends. These anthropomorphic animal characters appear in animation. The film has never been released on home video in the USA because of content which Disney executives believe would be construed by some as racially insensitive towards Blacks and is thus subject to much rumor, although it does exist on home video in the UK. The hit song from the film was “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”, which won the 1947 Academy Award for Best Song and is frequently used as part of Disney’s montage themes. The film inspired the Disney theme park ride Splash Mountain.

Although the film was a financial success, some critics were less responsive to the film. Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times, “More and more, Walt Disney’s craftsmen have been loading their feature films with so-called ‘live action’ in place of their animated whimsies of the past, and by just those proportions has the magic of these Disney films decreased,” citing the ratio of live action to animation at two to one, concluding that is “approximately the ratio of its mediocrity to its charm.” However, the film also received positive notice. Time magazine called the film “topnotch Disney.” In 2003, the Online Film Critics Society ranked the film as the 67th greatest animated film of all time.

Even early in the film’s production, there was concern that the material would encounter controversy. As the writing of the screenplay was getting under way, Disney publicist Vern Caldwell wrote to producer Perce Pearce that “The negro situation is a dangerous one. Between the negro haters and the negro lovers there are many chances to run afoul of situations that could run the gamut all the way from the nasty to the controversial.”

When the film was first released, the NAACP acknowledged “the remarkable artistic merit” of the film, but decried the supposed “impression it gives of an idyllic master-slave relationship” (even though the film was set after the American Civil War).

In 2007, Movies.com listed the film as the fifth most controversial film of all time. Click here for Movies.com 25 most controversial films of all time