Racism or erase-ism? The dilemma of Sunflower

It's been said about certain particularly pompous types of music (Wagner comes to mind) that "maybe it's better than it sounds." This statement puts me in mind of Disney's Fantasia.

Maybe it's worse than it seems. 

Disney was a farm boy at heart, and Fantasia was a country bumpkin's idea of high culture, a massive and lumbering delivery device for "good" music. Meaning, classical music, which you really should be exposing your children to, for their own good. Disney's choices were conservative:  Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, the Sorceror's Apprentice, Dance of the Hours, all things that leant themselves to the typical sentimental, florid Disney animation. And to throw in something really daring, Disney included a bit of Stravinsky to accompany T-rexes and stegosauri duking it out in a steamy primordial jungle.

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But that's not what we're talking about here.

We're talking about someone else.

We're talking about Sunflower.

There was a lot more to Fantasia than Mickey stemming the flood in The Sorcerer's Apprentice (the best-animated piece in the whole thing), dancing mushrooms, and alligators chasing after ostriches. There was this person. This - little horse, rather, and her name was Sunflower, featured briefly in the Pastoral Symphony's slow movement. 

We see a group  of pastel-colored horsettes, or should I say centaurettes, primping to meet their beefy centaur boyfriends. But they're not doing all the primping by themselves. To help them braid their manes and blow-dry their tails, they have. . . Sunflower.

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But, cute as she is, she's now a problem. Sunflower is clearly a servant, a little black girl trotting around obediently after all the glam horsettes. She's much smaller than the others, wears large gold hoop earrings, has stereotypical African features, and has her hair tied up in rags. In short, she's what people thought of in those days when you thought of a servant. Is she smaller because she's younger, a different kind of centaur, or what? It may have been a familiar visual device to convey relative status. This helped the audience orientate themselves, made it easier on them due to recognition of something they knew in the "real world".

She's something of a shock today, like seeing the godawful Steppin' Fetchit characters of the 1930s. By some Disney magic she was cut out of all prints of Fantasia when it was reissued for home video in the 1960s. Just - dropped, without an explanation, without a trace. This took some fancy dancing on the part of the animators, who had to try to keep the animation moving in synch with the music while the shears were applied. They used awkward closeups that left her out of the frame. The epitome of being marginalized! In one case, a red carpet eerily unrolled all by itself, because Sunflower was no longer there to unroll it.

Removing Sunflower was considered to be a "solution". She had been solved -or dissolved - by being erased, un-drawn, un-created. Undone. 

It was as if she had never existed at all. It seems, to me, a curious solution to a racist portrait, but that's what they did. Thus, they never had to take any responsibility for what they had already done. This was Papa Disney, after all, and he was clearly above all that.

If they hadn't erased Sunflower, there would no doubt have been an outcry. I understand the outcry, yes. But it confuses me. The whole thing does. If she had been a real live human being, it would have been more complicated - but maybe not by much. It was as if Sunflower were the shit-disturber, the joker in an otherwise conservative deck. So the trap door had to open. There was no other way.

Or - ?

Max Fleischer found another way, or at least his studio did, when it came time to release a DVD set of the complete Popeye cartoons (which I, of course, have). At the beginning of each DVD is a disclaimer stating that some of the cartoons feature characters and images which might be considered racist and offensive, but that these reflect the attitudes and prejudices of their time. And to censor or remove these images would be to pretend those attitudes never existed at all.

Brilliant.

But soft! What's this? A little later on in the Pastoral Symphony, we have the fat drunk guy on the donkey, Dionysus or whoever-the-hell-he-is. He's a silly character, rolling around, and meant to be. But who's that on either side of him? Look fast, because they are there for exactly ten seconds.

These are black servants, half-zebra instead of half-horse. They are quite glamorous, much taller than Dionysus - in fact, they tower over him - and their job is to fan him and keep his wine glass topped up. No matter how different they look from Sunflower, they are still servants, and they are black.

And they've been allowed to stay.

I've always found that weird. Is it the fact they're more adult, more exotic, taller, and less the little plantation girl than Sunflower? Are zebras more acceptable (half-white, after all) than horses or ponies? Is it the fact they're waiting on a man, instead of a bunch of pony-girls? I can't quite understand the thinking here. Or was it just too hard to animate them out or turn them into camels or something?

What's even stranger though is that Sunflower has a sunflower in her hair in some shots, and not in others - and this is in the same scene! It comes and goes, comes and goes at the whim of the animators. Did they know she was going to be cut out? No, she was there when the movie opened to great fanfare in 1940. (It was a flop. The public found such forced musical edification pompous and boring.) Nobody noticed it, I'd imagine, or thought much of the fact that there was a cute little Negro girl waiting on the ladies. It wouldn't have raised an eyebrow. It doesn't now, either, because it can't!  Sunflower has left the building.

Only this time, she's gone for good.

The Little Ash Girl: what lies beneath the story of Cinderella

I remember this recorded version of Cinderella much more vividly than the Disney movie. For one thing, it's strung together by the music from Prokofiev's ballet, one of my favorite orchestral pieces. It's weird, because the music must have made an impression on me in my childhood - as much as the story, at least - but it sort of faded out of my mind until a couple of decades ago, when I stumbled on the ballet music again and felt my scalp prickle from the stirring of memory.

This record, or records (two 78 rpms) gracefully incorporated the quirkily gorgeous Prokofiev ballet score. The narrator might as well have shut up and let the music tell the story. Listening to it as an adult, there is a certain edge, a pleasing tartness in the music that cuts the sweetness, and a real sense of irony, of tongue-in-cheek. Cinderella is almost - not quite, but almost - a madcap figure, a sort of puppet acting out her fate because "that's how the story goes". Then there are those stepsisters, nasty spinsters spinning their nasty webs. In a TV version of the ballet, one of the stepsisters was around 180 pounds, twice the size of the standard ballerina, and took her pratfalls with good humor (though it was obvious she was a very good dancer). In contrast, the other stepsister was a menacing rack of bones.

Once you start digging into the deeper layers of fairy tales, you find yourself gasping and floundering. There is just too damn much "meaning", too many layers, and some versions are wildly conflicting. The earliest Cinderella story was some Sumerian thing from the Fourth Dynasty (or whatever), and the story involved fish. It took place on boats and in tombs. How could the two be linked? I was also surprised to find that the Grimm brothers, known for telling stories too gory and disturbing for children, were known to sanitize these primal folk tales to make them more palatable (and sell more books). But even their cleaned-up versions are so shocking they are almost in poor taste, at least for children.

With Cinderella, the Grimms were somehow connecting us to a stranger, older and darker story (and much longer - each of these fairy tales would fill a  book) than the stereotypical and sugary version we have today. A fairy godmother? Not a chance. That would make it too easy. Here is how Aschenputtel (Cinderella in German, which literally translates as the nasty nickname The Ash Fool) gets her gold-and-silver ball gown:

As no one was now at home, Cinderella went to her mother's grave beneath the hazel-tree, and cried,

"Shiver and quiver, little tree,
Silver and gold throw down over me."

Then the bird threw a gold and silver dress down to her, and slippers embroidered with silk and silver. She put on the dress with all speed, and went to the wedding. Her step-sisters and the step-mother however did not know her, and thought she must be a foreign princess, for she looked so beautiful in the golden dress. They never once thought of Cinderella, and believed that she was sitting at home in the dirt, picking lentils out of the ashes. The prince approached her, took her by the hand and danced with her. He would dance with no other maiden, and never let loose of her hand, and if any one else came to invite her, he said, "This is my partner."

Right away, I think of My Fair Lady, and how no one recognized the "draggletailed guttersnipe" Eliza Doolittle because Henry Higgins passed her off as a Hungarian princess. It's such a direct hit that it makes me shiver. G. B. Shaw was no fool, knew his fairy tales, and knew how to hit a nerve.

So is the Ash Girl's ball gown a disguise, or something else? Perhaps her grimy sackcloth was some kind of veil, and the shimmering gown she took from her mother's grave a reflection of her deeper self. It literally turns her into someone else, or back into the person she was meant to be - someone even her family doesn't recognize. The storyteller plays with identity here in a way which is downright spooky.

There's no stroke-of-midnight in the story, but Aschenputtel must beat a hasty retreat after the ball. She hides in a pigeon-house or something - what an odd place to hide! In this strange version there is more than one ball - one version claims, "the Prince had three balls", which I thought was pretty funny. So she must return to the graveyard for a new dress each night.

Cinderella's dead mother figures large in this story, as do those enigmatic white birds. Where Disney got all those mice is anyone's guess. I could find no pumpkins here either. There is a controversy around the slippers, whether they were made of glass or not (the Grimms seemed to think not), and some versions even suggest they were made from fur. It's hard for us to picture our heroine clomping around in comfy bedroom slippers at the ball. But let's press on.

Next morning, he went with it to the father, and said to him, no one shall be my wife but she whose foot this golden slipper fits. Then were the two sisters glad, for they had pretty feet. The eldest went with the shoe into her room and wanted to try it on, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said, "Cut the toe off, when you are queen you will have no more need to go on foot." The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the king's son. Then he took her on his his horse as his bride and rode away with her. They were obliged, however, to pass the grave, and there, on the hazel-tree, sat the two pigeons and cried,

"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
there's blood within the shoe,
the shoe it is too small for her,
the true bride waits for you."

Then he looked at her foot and saw how the blood was trickling from it. He turned his horse round and took the false bride home again, and said she was not the true one, and that the other sister was to put the shoe on. Then this one went into her chamber and got her toes safely into the shoe, but her heel was too large. So her mother gave her a knife and said, "Cut a bit off your heel, when you are queen you will have no more need to go on foot." The maiden cut a bit off her heel, forced her foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the king's son. He took her on his horse as his bride, and rode away with her, but when they passed by the hazel-tree, the two pigeons sat on it and cried,

"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
there's blood within the shoe,
the shoe it is too small for her,
the true bride waits for you."

The repetition of rhymes, incantations and spells is an indispensible part of this kind of storytelling, usually in threes (the "turn and peep" shows up three times). Characters come and go as if through a revolving door, in and out of reality. The mystical significance of birds can't be overemphasized in this version, particularly the two white pigeons, who play a more active role than many of the humans. 

All sorts of analysts have tried to figure out the slippers. Some say they are representative of female genitalia, which I don't really get (though they do get bloody in a way which suggests the female fertility cycle). Shoes allow one to walk in public, be mobile, go forth. Dance. In contrast to the slippers (whatever they're made of), there are also big heavy wooden clogs, low-status peasant shoes,  made for those who toil in the dirt.

Walk a mile in my shoes. The old woman who lived in a shoe. If the shoe fits. . .

He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking quite red. Then he turned his horse and took the false bride home again. "This also is not the right one," said he, "have you no other daughter." "No," said the man, "there is still a little stunted kitchen-wench which my late wife left behind her, but she cannot possibly be the bride." The king's son said he was to send her up to him, but the mother answered, oh, no, she is much too dirty, she cannot show herself. But he absolutely insisted on it, and Cinderella had to be called.

I can't help but feel this is a reference to virginity, an absolute must for marriage, particularly to nobility. To marry, and particularly to "marry up", one absolutely had to be pure. The mother seems to be saying in so many words that her daughter is too "dirty" to be considered. And her own father is calling her a "little stunted kitchen-wench", a mere leftover from his first marriage - "wench" being a term for a "loose woman". Is this why white doves swirl and flutter around the story as proof of Aschenputtel's unassailable virginity?

She first washed her hands and face clean, and then went and bowed down before the king's son, who gave her the golden shoe. Then she seated herself on a stool, drew her foot out of the heavy wooden shoe, and put it into the slipper, which fitted like a glove. And when she rose up and the king's son looked at her face he recognized the beautiful maiden who had danced with him and cried, "That is the true bride." The step-mother and the two sisters were horrified and became pale with rage, he, however, took Cinderella on his horse and rode away with her. As they passed by the hazel-tree, the two white doves cried,

"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
no blood is in the shoe,
the shoe is not too small for her,
the true bride rides with you."

There's so much here that I can't begin to get into it!  Bloody shoes, false brides, hazel trees and white pigeons which have somehow, mysteriously, become doves. And dead mothers, and a maiden's tears having the magical power of  healing and summoning. Sliding her foot into that slipper does have a sexual feel to it - the perfect fit - casting off virginity and stepping across the threshhold into womanhood. Of course this version is a translation from the more stolid German, so some expressions may have been extensively reworked. The magic incantations were probably quite altered, as they had to rhyme, scan and make sense. But all those bleeding, chopped-up feet - . Isn't this a desperation to escape one's station in life, to move on up or social-climb, even at the cost of being able to walk? Only Aschenputtel has the grace to hold off and allow the Prince to recognize her face. Yes, her face - not her foot.

I skipped the part where the Prince sets a trap for the Little Ash Girl by spreading pitch on the stairs of the ballroom (so at least one of her furry slippers will get stuck). I skipped the nastiness of the stepmother throwing lentils into the ashes on the floor, each grain of which Aschenputtel must pluck out by hand (probably digging into the skin on her knees). And when did ashes become cinders? Cinders are almost like live coals, not quite burned out, and quite dangerous. Don't get a cinder in your eye.

I also stumbled on a version in which the stepsisters were actually beautiful, but deadly. In other words, they were beautiful to look at but had nasty personalities. I've always had a lot of trouble telling little girls that "ugly" characters in fairy tales are "bad", and "beautiful" ones are "good". Just what does that mean? How much effect does it have on the average impressionable girl?

At any rate, my beloved 78 rpm version has no amputated toes, nor does Prokofiev's. But the ending of the Grimm version is a killer. The magical doves have alerted the Prince to Aschenputtel's true identity:

"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
no blood is in the shoe,
the shoe is not too small for her,
the true bride rides with you."

And when they had cried that, the two came flying down and placed themselves on Cinderella's shoulders, one on the right, the other on the left, and remained sitting there. When the wedding with the king's son was to be celebrated, the two false sisters came and wanted to get into favor with Cinderella and share her good fortune. When the betrothed couple went to church, the elder was at the right side and the younger at the left, and the pigeons pecked out one eye from each of them. Afterwards as they came back the elder was at the left, and the younger at the right, and then the pigeons pecked out the other eye from each. And thus, for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness all their days.

Yoicks! Blindness all their days! This isn't very merciful, is it? Very forgiving? But it interests me that the Little Ash Girl doesn't have to do any of the dirtywork - the white doves are her unlikely agents of revenge. Even a symbol of peace is full of hidden menace.

Though we often hear that these stories are too ancient to trace down to their roots, somebody must have thought of them, started them at some point in antiquity. Versions swirled around and were added to and (obviously) sanitized, but then it all sort of hardened, like the glass slipper. So even this relatively-modern Grimm tale of blindness and bleeding feet is about as far away from the Disney version as it gets.

FOOTNOTE! More on the glass/fur controversy:

The illustrated Antique Fairy Tales book sums up the argument in a footnote:

“There is no doubt that in the medieval versions of this ancient tale Cinderella was given pantoufles de vair – i.e. [slippers of] fur … probably [from] a grey squirrel. Long before the seventeenth century, the word vair had passed out of use… Thus the pantoufles de vair of the fairy tale became, in the oral tradition, the homonymous pantoufles de verre, or glass slippers.”

Birth of the Swan Queen

A song nearly forgotten (then remembered)

Over the Hills

The old hound wags his shaggy tail,

And I know what he would say:

It’s over the hills we’ll bound, old hound,

Over the hills, and away.

There’s nought for us here save to count the clock,

And hang the head all day:

But over the hills we’ll bound, old hound,

Over the hills and away.

Here among men we’re like the deer

That yonder is our prey:

So, over the hills we’ll bound, old hound,

Over the hills and away.

The hypocrite is master here,

But he’s the cock of clay:

So, over the hills we’ll bound, old hound,

Over the hills and away.

The women, they shall sigh and smile,

And madden whom they may:

It’s over the hills we’ll bound, old hound,

Over the hills and away.

Let silly lads in couples run

To pleasure, a wicked fay:

’Tis ours on the heather to bound, old hound,

Over the hills and away.

The torrent glints under the rowan red,

And shakes the bracken spray:

What joy on the heather to bound, old hound,

Over the hills and away.

The sun bursts broad, and the heathery bed

Is purple, and orange, and gray:

Away, and away, we’ll bound, old hound,

Over the hills and away.

George Meredith

This poem awakened a memory of something we used to sing in school. The piece was a tweedy, ruddy English thing, an adaptation of this George Meredith poem which the school choir sang in the Kiwanis Music Festival: "It's over the hills we'll bound, old hound,/Over the hills and away!". It was a common enough choral number then, and I expected to find a nice YouTube video of it somewhere. But I couldn't find any trace of it, on YouTube or anywhere else. Led Zeppelin recorded something called Over the Hills and Far Away, but I knew that wasn't it.

The poem is good enough to stand alone - I guess -  but when I can't find something. . . What annoys me is that it's harder than ever to find things on Google or YouTube or anywhere else, due to sheer volume and congestion. Every day millions more entries are added. This harms, rather than helps your search because of all the CRAP in the way.

This reminded me of something else I tried to track down the other day, and couldn't.

I even remember making gifs of it (and please forgive me for not using GIFS - capital letter always seem to scream at me), but I can't find them anywhere. This is odd, because I always save the gifs I make - I have thousands of them by now. It was an old cartoon - I assumed Disney, because it was one of those sylvan things where nymphlike creatures frolic around, wearing practically nothing. You know what I mean - they're dancing and capering around in a village with thatched roofs, etc., while a man sings in a very high voice.

But that's not the part I wanted.

At a certain point in this pastoral scene, a bunch of the cherubs or whatever-they-are were pulling on a massive bolt which held a huge sort of gate together. They tugged and tugged on it, and when it finally came loose an explosion of water burst out, causing a massive river to tumble and cascade down the dry rocks and hills. It was extremely erotic, and I remember playing that bit over and over again. The animation was, as I remember, outstanding. Animating water convincingly is no small feat. I thought of The Sorcerer's Apprentice in Fantasia, with a doomed Mickey swirling down the drain, his mouth open in a round black O.

I'm trying to remember ANY other identifying details of this cartoon. Disney? Fleischer? Warner Bros.? Merrie Melodies (not likely!)? Happy Harmonies? Silly Symphonies? Obviously every studio had a version of this: cartoons that were churned out weekly for theatrical release. This one was colour, in my memory at least, and the little creatures reminded me of those cherubs in Fantasia:

(I only had three frames to work with here, so pardon the jerkiness.)

It wasn't Fantasia. I checked. I went through synopses of all the Silly Symphonies, including the much-hated Bugs in Love (which was always being shown on the Mickey Mouse Club, much to our disgust. By that time, Hanna-Barbera had become the standard.) Water Babies, a Disney Silly Symphony from which I made these three gifs, was downright disturbing to me because of the excessive focus on small children's bare bums. At least, they look like small children. Was sexual abuse so unthinkable then that child nudity passed without notice?

After much fruitless and boring searching, I've given up on the lost cartoon. It will ever remain a memory. Though I wish I had some idea how to describe it to Google.

Blogger's afterthought. The more I look at that George Meredith poem, the more alarmed I become. The guy is not just a misogynist: he's a misanthrope, apparently hating the whole human condition. The poet is sick of watching the clock in depression, tired of the hypocrisy of those who seem to hold worldly power. In the company of men, he feels like "prey" (the deer, usually the target of such romps). The "cock of clay" line confused me, until I realized that the guy is fantasizing about skeet-shooting, with his enemies as the target.

And women! Forget about it, they're all tarts and temptresses. But boys pose even more of a dilemma: "Let silly lads in couples run/To pleasure, a wicked fay". I found one meaning of "fay" which kind of disturbed me:

fay (third-person singular simple present fays, present participle faying, simple past and past participle fayed)
To fit.
To join or unite closely or tightly.
To lie close together.
To fadge.

So, to fay is to fadge. Right, it all makes sense now.

The last two verses, which I remember because the tempo changes at the end, are gorgeous:

The torrent glints under the rowan red,

And shakes the bracken spray:

What joy on the heather to bound, old hound,

Over the hills and away.

The sun bursts broad, and the heathery bed

Is purple, and orange, and gray:

Away, and away, we’ll bound, old hound,

Over the hills and away.

On the last verse we sang, "The sun. . . bursts. . . broad," the part of it which stayed in my head, along with the purple, and orange, and grey. "Over the hill" can of course be a synonym for "old and obsolete", but Meredith doesn't seem to mind: his greatest desire is to get the hell away, as far away as possible, from the whole chaotic human mess.

ADDENDA. Fadge.

Verb

fadge (third-person singular simple present fadges, present participle fadging, simple past and past participle fadged)
(obsolete, intransitive) To be suitable (with or to something).  
(obsolete, intransitive) To agree, to get along (with).  
(obsolete, intransitive) To get on well; to cope, to thrive.  
(Geordie) To eat together.
(Yorkshire, of a horse) To move with a gait between a jog and a trot.

Noun

fadge (plural fadges)
(Ireland) Irish potato bread; a flat farl, griddle-baked, often served fried.
(New Zealand) A wool pack, traditionally made of jute, now often synthetic.
(Geordie) A small loaf or bun made with left-over dough.
(Yorkshire) A gait of horses between a jog and a trot.

Blowhard: why Trump looks exactly like Willie the Whale

Disney's zebra centaurs: the lost tapes

Here, after much searching, is a very brief but significant clip from the Pastoral Symphony segment of Disney's Fantasia. I wanted to see this because it features, if ever-so-briefly, two glorious zebra centaurettes who weren't erased from the final cut.

This voyage into cinematic racism in human/equine hybrids started with Sunflower, the little black girl who acted as a handmaiden/possible slave to the pastel-coloured centaurettes. Sunflower, who was half-donkey rather than half-horse, was edited out so thoroughly that she no longer appears in the DVD version of the movie at all, and even looks to have been photoshopped out of one scene.

That turned out to be wrong. The little black centaurette/donkey/possible slave who unrolled the red carpet for Bacchus/Dionysis and the gang was a character called Otika. It was nice of the animators to name her, but not so great when she almost instantly vanished from view.  Once she was photoshopped out, we were left with the bizarre phenomenon of the red carpet unrolling all by itself.

Better black magic than an admission of racist stereotyping. The solution seemed to be getting rid of the character altogether. But what of the zebra-ettes, who aren't even given names? They too act as servants: one of them fans the fat,drunken Bacchus, and the other keeps his wine glass sloshing over the top. Within ten seconds or so, both of them have quickly moved out of the frame.

 

I don't know what the rationale is here. These are grown women, obviously; but it is equally obvious they are black, perhaps even African, since their lower halves are not horse but zebra.

Were these exotic creatures serving Bacchus out of love, or because they were earning a salary? Disney was a known cheapskate who might just have kept his zebra hybrids on slave wages.

It's impossible to untangle this one because it's such a bizarre example of erasing something that is just too embarrassing to leave in. Having a sort of little black Sambo-ette/servant figure in the movie is inappropriate, but why is it OK to get rid of her completely? The magnificent Deviantart depictions of Sunflower are reclaiming her from obscurity, giving her her power back. And I'm all for that.

DeviantArtSunflower

But Otika, her two-second film appearance now more rarefied than the unicorn or even the centaur, can take comfort in the fact that she is not the only actress whose performance has ended up on the cutting room floor.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

First there is a flower, then there is no flower, then there is

Disney's Fantasia is one of those highbrow thingammies that you're supposed to appreciate because it's Culture.

It's high culture that is Good For You, like some kind of medicine you have to swallow for your own elevation. 

It was meant to give children a clinical dose of classical music with all sorts of fun cartoons to watch while they suffered through it. They got Beethoven. They got Tchaikovsky. They got Moussorg-whatever-his-name-was, the big guy on the mountain. 

I don't think a child ever liked Fantasia, and certainly no child ever loved it. Most adults were likely kind of bored with it too, but trundled the family off to see it anyway as a sort of educational duty.

Fantasia bores ME to death, and I have never even seen it. I fell in the generational cracks between the movie's release in 1940, and the tepid bits that appeared on TV on Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color (which, of course, we watched in black and white). I don't think I saw more than five minutes of it at a time.

But speaking of black and white!

I never knew there was anything disturbing in Fantasia except its length, its pomposity, and those dinosaurs killing each other to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Now I know. There was a little black girl in there who was excised. I mean, cut out. Cut RIGHT out. Cut out because her very presence was seen to be offensive.

She was offensive sort of the way Mammy in Gone With the Wind is now seen as offensive, and yes, I sort of get it. Personally I love Mammy in Gone With the Wind because she is the glue holding the whole thing together, and her character, though limited by the strictures of the servant role, is powerful and nuanced. All Scarlett does is run around looking gorgeous.

But that aside: there was, in Fantasia, in the Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony section with all the centaurs and cherubs and Dionysian types capering around, a small character named Sunflower. Sunflower existed, then she didn't. She made one appearance on TV which I don't remember (for surely Fantasia was never shown in its entirety on TV). But when the movie was theatrically re-released in the late 1960s, all trace of Sunflower had been removed.

Excised.

It was as if the little black centaurette had never existed.

This is a solution, is it not? Getting rid of something that is a problem. But it has disturbing echoes of The Final Solution, in that it says "hey, listen, folks, WE never displayed racist attitudes in our cartoons!" Nobody here but us white folks.

Here is an analysis of the whole mess from a film site (so I don't have to explain it any further - I'm lazy today):

Was it wrong for Disney to censor Fantasia to remove the character Sunflower?
One of the most controversial aspects of Disney's Fantasia is the censorship of the character Sunflower from the Pastoral Symphony segment of the film.

Sunflower is a centaurette (female centaur) who is depicted as being a hybrid of a young black girl and a donkey. She is shown performing duties as a servant to the other centaurettes who are depicted in a wide variety of pastel colors.

Beginning in the 1960s, Sunflower was deemed a racist and negative depiction of black people, and her scenes in the film were deleted. Beginning in 1990, the scenes were restored, but the shots she was in were cropped so that she could not be seen.

ranna.deviantart.com

There is much debate over whether she should've been removed from the film. There are those who say that she should be censored in order to move away from the attitude of depicting black people as negative stereotypes. Others say that she shouldn't be censored because such portrayals were very common in animated films of the time, and that removing them is the same as saying that they never existed in the first place. Some believe that there should be a middle ground; in other words, for example, the late film critic Roger Ebert felt that the original should be preserved for historical purposes, but that the censored version should be the one made available for mainstream consumers, in particular children.

                          atomicfireball.deviantart.com


Also of note: There are other black characters in the segment. There are two identical unnamed centaurettes who are part young black women and part zebra and another young black girl centaurette named Otika who in the original rolls out a red carpet; in all versions currently available, Otika is digitally removed so that the red carpet appears to unroll by itself, and the zebra centaurettes have never been altered or removed from the film.

(Note. I don't remember seeing those zebra-ettes before, but did I look? I see them now, and they're gorgeous, though I still notice echoes of servitude in their actions because they're waiting on that fat drunk guy.) 

Hattie McDaniel liked to say "I'd rather play a maid and be paid $100.00 than BE a maid and be paid $2.00." Or words to that effect. She had the right attitude: if you're restricted to roles that reflect the racist stereotypes of the times, then play the hell out of those roles, transcend the stereotypes and win an Oscar. 

But you can't do that if somebody just took an eraser to you and made you disappear.

We never let Sunflower have a chance.  She was cute, but a little disturbing, like Buckwheat in The Little Rascals. The thing is, The Little Rascals was ahead of its time: it depicted white and black kids all rolling around in the dust together, which no one else was doing. And Stymie, the solemn one with the bowler hat, was just the coolest character ever - I liked him way better than any of the white kids.

I find it interesting, though. First there is a Sunflower. Then there is no Sunflower. Then there is. Hello, folks. I'm back. I have my existence again, and I am here to tell you that THIS is the way it was in the 1940s, back when people were frankly racist and didn't try to dissemble. If you're not happy about it, you can try to get rid of me, but somehow or other, who knows when, I'll be back to haunt your conscience/consciousness again.

yvxgreatxboss.deviantart.com

POST-BLOG I-DIDN'T-SEE-THAT-BEFORE: Of course, if the animators were kind of uncertain about Sunflower's presence, it's likely they would start making errors, or at least be inconsistent about her appearance. If you watch the tiny clips which I giffed (since they were only a few seconds long in total), you'll note that there's a sunflower in her hair in SOME scenes, but by no means all. Sometimes it's just not there, only those little rags her hair is tied up in (and not even those, in some places). These scenes weren't meant to take place on different days or even different hours or minutes. So what happens to the sunflower? Why can't the animators get it together on how her hair is supposed to look? They wouldn't do that to Snow White, would they? 

APOLOGIA. For my habit of not always giving credit for certain kinds of artwork, I'm making amends here and now. 

deviantart.com is a fantastic site. I'm envious every time I look at it, because I can't make representative art to save my mortal soul. I might as well use a sharp stick and a little pile of dog shit, for all the results I get. But these Deviant Artists are superb, soaring in their talent and imagination. They display their art in a kind of vast internet gallery that gives the public a chance to admire and enjoy it, but in no way, shape or form can I claim it as mine.

So I've posted links to their pages on each of these superbilicious renderings of Sunflower, a Disney character reimagined not as a subservient, minority, or erased character, but as a gorgeous and powerful exotic her own right, a mythic creature whose beauty puts those pastel pink-and-blue horsettes to shame.

Addenda to the addenda . Though I love those gorgeous uncredited zebra centaurettes in Fantasia, I'm not keen on the fat, lolling, drunken Dionysus figure that goes with them. So here are a nice couple of crops.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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