2000

23.1

Michelle Wallace

The Celluloid Cabin: Satirical Distortions of Uncle Tom in Animated Cartoon Shorts, 1932-1947

Major Hollywood production studios such as Disney, Warner Brothers, and M-G-M, as well as such less-venerated institutions as Walter Lantz and Terrytoons, have developed a convoluted and often controversial legacy of animating race and ethnicity.  From the glib zip-a-dee-doo-dah of  Song of the South to the politically bowdlerized Pocahontas, the cartoon canon has galvanized the racial zeitgeist with unprecedented mobility and voice.  More importantly, these archives also serve to reflect, to exaggerate, and to manipulate those very fantasies in (often painfully) revealing ways.  One of the most salient—if, to the contemporary viewer, least accessible—examples of such racial distortion remains the conspicuousness of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as both a narrative template and comic fodder.  From 1932 to 1947, at least four cartoon shorts have appropriated Stowe’s text: Uncle Tom and Little Eva (Van Beuren, 1932), Uncle Tom’s Bungalow (Warner Brothers, 1937), Eliza On Ice (Terrytoons, 1944), and Uncle Tom’s Cabana (M-G-M, 1947). 

Karl F. Cohen, in his essential critical exegesis of censorship and blacklisting in the history of American animation, has insisted that “[r]acial stereotypes date back to the silent era. . . . By the early sound era, unflattering caricatures of almost every race and nationality had appeared in animated cartoons” (50).  As Cohen demonstrates, such “unflattering caricatures” were hardly restricted to African Americans.  For example, Warner Brothers’s wartime cartoon shorts, such as Tokio Jokio (1943) and Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (1944), favored unapologetically grotesque images of slant-eyed, buck-toothed Japanese soldiers; likewise, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination committee has lodged formal complaints of racist stereotyping against feature films as recent—and as popular—as Disney’s Aladdin (1993).  Meanwhile, caricatures of Native Americans, Irish Americans, Italians, Jews, Germans, and homosexuals continued to proliferate among major studio productions well into the 1950s, and many of the cartoons featuring these images are still aired on local and national television.

However, even taking under consideration the pandemic persistence of racial and ethnic stereotyping in these early cartoon shorts, the representation of African American characters—in particular, of Uncle Tom and Eliza—demands further and more delicate excavation.  Cohen acknowledges that, unlike the profusion of Jewish and Irish American animators among the creative ranks of major and minor studios alike, “there were very few African Americans in the animation industry” (50).  Predictably, the likelihood of a black artist, director, or censor objecting to a cartoon’s racial content in the production stages proved slim indeed.  Perhaps even more problematic than the absence of African American animators, however, is the fact that many of these animated images derived not from some generalized aesthetic or behavioral trope, however distasteful it might be—for example, the bearded and hook-nosed Jewish peddler, the drunken Irish police officer, or even the “happy darkie.”  Instead, the use of a particular literary text and cultural artifact as a reliquary of recognizable characters, settings, and situations indicates the animated presence of not simply a single racial stereotype, but rather a complete racial mythology more elaborate, more organized, and, arguably more insidious than any stock behavioral stereotype.

Even immured within the highly particular narrative terrain of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, these early animators have afforded themselves considerable artistic license, both in the depiction of characters’ bodies, clothing, and comportment, and in the comic adaptation of the narrative itself.  Despite their undeniably racist representation of African American characters, these shorts remain nominally progressive in their parodic exaggeration of an already hyperbolic racial master narrative.  The satirical use of a once-serious and politically relevant text such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin reveals not so much a bathetic declension as it does the audience’s capacity to identify such animated caricatures as doubly hyperbolic and, therefore, doubly ludicrous; that is, the satiric potential of the original text remains eminently appreciable to the audience.  As such, these (now almost universally censored) cartoons point to a more sophisticated and more nuanced apprehension of traditional racial tropes than the dated and objectionable content itself might initially suggest.

The earliest recapitulation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in an animated cartoon short remains Uncle Tom and Little Eva, produced for theatrical release in 1932 by Van Beuren Studios.  Cohen is quick to dismiss Van Beuren’s “occasional references” to racial and ethnic groups, suggesting that “[t]heir cartoons were less sophisticated than [the products of other studios], so they tended to do very little with ethnic images in terms of developing solid gags” (72).  However, this nine-minute black-and-white short, directed by Paul Terry (who would later found Terrytoons, spawning the likes of Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle), offers a thorough, if highly stylized, catalogue of racial caricatures.  The short opens with a shot of a steamboat manned by a series of suspiciously Mickey-like mice—perhaps an ironic tip of the hat to Disney’s seminal Steamboat Willie (1928).  As the mice commence an improvised rendition of “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” the figures of Topsy and Eva appear, both emphatically neotenous, yet (literally) dehumanized: Topsy assumes the clichéd form of a monkey, while Eva appears in the ignominious avatar of a hippopotamus.  A humanoid Simon Legree, twirling his mustache and sporting the villain’s requisite tall black boots and hat, interrupts Uncle Tom’s blithe soft-shoe, whipping him and ushering him to the “SLAVE AUCTION TODAY!”  Atop the auction block, Uncle Tom, clad only in trousers, suspenders, and a dilapidated stovepipe hat, performs a bandy-legged soft-shoe to a ragtime tune.  The biceps of the feeble and evidently quite frightened Uncle Tom quiver and bounce rhythmically down his flaccid arms, until, finally, he collapses in what appears to be exhaustion, a halo of stars circling his head.

Legree quickly turns his attention from the old man to the figures of Eliza and her infant son, Harry, both of whom literally turn white with fear as the musical chorus alerts them to the villain’s approach.  Enlisting the help of his hounds, Legree embarks on a protracted chase of the lissome Eliza, who performs an exaggerated ballet of leaps and pas-de-bourrés across a series of ice floes.  As the chase devolves into increasingly whimsical choreography, Uncle Tom sits dejectedly outside his cabin, polishing his leg irons.  At the desperate behest of Topsy, who informs him of Eliza’s predicament, Uncle Tom responds with superhero-like resilience and runs—still affixed to his ball and chain—to Eliza’s rescue.  Enraged, Uncle Tom jettisons his ball and chain, which land squarely in Legree’s rowboat, capsizing it and effectively saving Eliza.  In the final (and rather abrupt) tableau, Topsy, Eliza, and Uncle Tom stand in the snow and perform an up-tempo, yet reverent, chorus of “Dixie.” 

Any attention to narrative unity or textual faithfulness in Uncle Tom and Little Eva clearly takes a back seat to concerns of musical virtuosity and animated choreography; however, Fred “Tex” Avery, of Bugs Bunny fame, reprises many of the cartoon’s tropes, motifs, and gimmicks in Warner Brothers’s 1937 short, Uncle Tom’s Bungalow, without sacrificing a cohesive storyboard or aesthetic invention.  Several differences emerge immediately.  For example, in a rather peculiar narrative framing device, a (presumably white) male narrator not only introduces the story’s characters to the audience, but also engages in direct dialogue with those characters, the audience, and even the musical accompanists.  Moreover, the animators have eschewed Paul Terry’s previous equating of the characters with particular animal identities, electing instead to portray them as comparatively human.  However, Uncle Tom and Eliza fare little better in Avery’s imagination than under Terry’s zoological scrutiny.  Uncle Tom seems to have developed a more pronounced pot-belly, and has exchanged his overalls and stovepipe for patched trousers, a tattered coat, and a carefully chiaroscuroed white beard.  He retains his hunched and tremulous gait, contrary to his assertion that “Brother, my knees ain’t shakin’!  I’se truckin!”  The figure of Eliza, meanwhile, has changed surprisingly little since Paul Terry’s adaptation; clad in a patched shift and head wrapped in a kerchief, Eliza preserves the exaggerated simian features, large feet, beanpole frame, and acrobatic proclivities of her previous incarnation in Uncle Tom and Little Eva.  Finally, Simon Legree remains virtually identical to Terry’s earlier vision, having only shed his tail in favor of a more serpentine identity as proprietor of  “Smilin’ Simon-Simon Legree’s Used Slave Co.”

After the narrator’s extended series of introductions, Legree (christened here “Seemoan-Seemoan”) commences his de rigeur villain schtick of menacing laughter, mustache-twirling, and whip-lashing in the direction of Uncle Tom, who retorts defiantly, “My body might belong to you, but my soul belongs to Warner Brothers!”  Topsy and Eva, skipping hand-in-hand, rescue Uncle Tom from further abuse by offering to “buy the nice old man.”  Legree initially complies, but when his books reveal that Topsy and Eva are three months past due on their payments on Uncle Tom, he sets out to repossess his slave.  His unsuccessful search of their house prompts Legree to turn his whip on Topsy and Little Eva, who, in fright, undergo a momentary color switch.  Suddenly, Eliza appears and flees toward the river with a child under each arm, pausing only to gamble at a nickel slot machine, whose jackpot provides a neat bridge of ice floes.   The ensuing chase, narrated in the monotonous cadence of a horse race, ends abruptly when a triumphant Uncle Tom rolls up in a sleek new car, sporting a shiny top hat and brandishing a fistful of dollars.  “The winner,” concedes the narrator, “is Uncle Tom.  Looks like the old boy has collected on his social security.”  Uncle Tom pays Legree for his freedom, and conspiratorially reveals to the audience the true origin of his “social security”: a pair of loaded dice. 

Based on the cinematic and narrative sophistication of Warner Brothers’s Uncle Tom’s Bungalow compared to its 1932 predecessor, one might presume an (admittedly slight) linear progression in the overall quality and even racial sensitivity of the Uncle Tom cartoons at large.  However, Eliza On Ice, directed by Conrad “Connie” Rasinki and released by Terrytoons in 1944, resuscitates many of the characterizations, as well as the basic narrative structure, of the incunabular Uncle Tom and Little Eva.  Evidently, Paul Terry, producer of the Terrytoons studio, had no compunctions about recycling much of his previous work for the Van Beuren studios in the 1930s; consequently, Eliza On Ice becomes a precarious amalgam of the now-formulaic Eliza-versus-Legree antagonism and Terry’s trademark Mighty Mouse superhero adventure.  Moreover, Eliza On Ice seems to represent a vast thematic departure from the standard Terrytoons stock—so much so, in fact, that the short fails to appear in critical discussions of the Terrytoons oeuvre with regard to race:  Cohen’s otherwise exhaustive studio-by-studio research on animated stereotypes all but absolves Terrytoons of racism, citing only a single blackface “explosion gag” in a 1954 Heckle and Jeckle cartoon.  He makes no mention of Eliza On Ice.

Like Uncle Tom and Little Eva, Eliza On Ice opens with a Dixieland jazz number, to which a bespectacled and now considerably heavier-set Uncle Tom jitterbugs enthusiastically.  Arrayed in comparatively unshabby trousers, white shirt, black vest, and crooked stovepipe hat, Rasinki’s Uncle Tom has exchanged his quivering limbs and uninspired biceps for what appears to be heavy-lidded slow wit; more importantly, he has abdicated his position as protagonist and superhero, instead relegating himself to a marginal position as starting judge in Legree and Eliza’s race. 

Eliza, now adorned with stereotypical “Mammy” accouterments, including a polka-dotted head rag and oversized white apron, flees to the edge of the river, where, in what appears to be a direct plagiarism of Tex Avery’s 1937 version, she is afforded a convenient  ice floe bridge, thanks to a slot machine jackpot.  The pursuit continues aboard a steam locomotive, where Eliza and her son pelt Legree with watermelons.  Meanwhile, Little Eva—no longer a baby hippo nor a rosy-cheeked moppet, but rather a voluptuous woman sporting angel wings and a low-cut white gown—grows increasingly alarmed as she views Eliza’s predicament from heaven.  She immediately rings up Mighty Mouse, and in a husky Southern drawl, informs him that “There’s a rumor goin’ ‘round up here that Simon Legree is up to his ol’ tricks again.”  Naturally, Mighty Mouse flexes his muscles and flies to the rescue of Eliza, the site of whose chase with Legree has, without warning, shifted to a paddle-wheel riverboat.  As the boat containing Legree and his hounds drops over a waterfall and explodes offscreen, Mighty Mouse hoists aloft Eliza and Harry atop an oversized ice floe and deposits them once again at the doorstep of Uncle Tom’s cabin.  Their return is heralded by a chorus of jubilant slaves, who cavort and serenade the trio with a heartfelt, if ill-rhymed, hymn: “Shout hallelujah, here comes ‘Liza / Here comes ‘Liza flyin’ home again / Shout hallelujah, here comes ‘Liza / Thanks again, Mighty Mouse!” 

Neither of Paul Terry’s Uncle Tom-themed offerings retains the original characterization, narrative unity, and overall artistic integrity of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Uncle Tom’s Cabana.  Directed in 1947 by Tex Avery, formerly of Warner Brothers, this storyboard departs almost entirely from the familiar Eliza-Legree antagonism, instead showcasing the (now unabashedly sexualized) diva, Little Eva, and disposing of Eliza’s role altogether.  Likewise, Uncle Tom himself endures a drastic metamorphosis: now almost grotesquely rotund, and clad in unflatteringly tight trousers, white dickie, and undersized bowler hat, Uncle Tom becomes at once the protagonist, narrator, and (would-be) hero of this adaptation.  In the opening tableau, he smokes a stogie and vows to the circle of children seated at his feet to relate “the real, true story ‘bout Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  In a precociously postmodern gesture of self-referentiality, he adds confidentially, “Now, this is the first time one of dem Hollywood [ac]counts ever got de straight dope on Uncle Tom stuff.  This is de way it really happened.” 

Set in a stylized Manhattan, the avaricious Simon Legree, president of a bank specializing in “Loans, Mortgages, and Crooked Deals,” endeavors to “own the whole town” by foreclosing the mortgage on Uncle Tom’s incongruously modest in-town cabin and backyard cotton garden.  As Legree threatens to repossess the cabin by midnight, a forlorn Uncle Tom places a phone call to his “one last hope, [his] only friend, Little Eva,” who lives on the roof of a high-rise in a “scrumptious Southern plantation.”  The two collaborate and transform the cabin into a swinging—and more importantly, profitable—nightclub that features dining, dancing, and, of course, a medley of suggestive torch songs by the flame-haired and hoop-skirted Little Eva.  In his article, “Tex Arcana: The Cartoons of Tex Avery,” Ronnie Schieb adroitly summarizes Uncle Tom’s yarn in context of its wildly unmistakable sexual composition:

[As Eva] yearns with velvet voice for someone to carry her back to Ole Virginny, . . .Simon Legree (a barely human version of the Wolf), all controls spinning madly, compulsively and blindly runs the gamut of time-honored sex substitutes: in his sexual insanity, Legree unwittingly smokes his own nose, stubbing it out in an ashtray, “celeries” the salt cellar and munches on it (his teeth dropping out into a convenient butter dish), slices himself a wedge of table and chomps away, butters his hands and devours them up to the elbow, and gallops off with the middle chunk of a stage-prop Colonial pillar in his arms, instead of the redhaired plantation belle, Little Eva.  (122)

Uncle Tom then voice-over narrates a Rasputin-esque litany of Legree’s outlandish—and increasingly violent—plots for his tenant’s demise, all of which Uncle Tom either circumvents or survives. As Scheib recounts:

[C]ast alternately as Superman (repelling machine gun bullets with his ill-fitting costume) and victim of escalating Legree-propelled forces (camels, elephants, battleships, and steamrollers), sometimes even in situations generally reserved for the damsel in distress (tied to a floating log about to pass through a whirring saw, lashed to railroad tracks), until in the final phallic finale, he tosses the Umpire State Building [sic] with Simon Legree on top over the moon.  (123)

Squinting skeptically up at the storyteller, one of the children dares to question the veracity of the tale, whereupon Uncle Tom guarantees that “If’n this ain’t de troof, may lightnin’ come down here and strike me dead!”  Uncle Tom is instantly zapped by a bolt and floats heavenward, transparent and angelic.  Turning to the audience, the child simply shrugs and exclaims, “We lose more Uncle Toms dat way!” 

Clearly, these four cartoons reflect disparate and highly idiosyncratic adaptations of Stowe’s 1852 text, providing over a fifteen-year span a wildly inconsistent range of voices, dispositions, and images of the Uncle Tom figure himself.  It is this variety, this discrepancy in the collective artistic imagination, finally, that reveals the profundity of the text’s inherent capacity for satire.  Harriet Beecher Stowe takes pains to “daguerreotype for our readers” both the psychic and the physiological manifestations of Uncle Tom’s heroic function. As Stowe writes:

He was a large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man, of a full glossy black, and a face whose truly African features were characterized by an expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much kindliness and benevolence.  There was something about his whole air self-respecting and dignified, yet united with a confiding and humble simplicity.  (27)

However specific Stowe might have been in her original description of Uncle Tom, meanwhile, the cartoonists have departed emphatically from that image of hyperbolic virility and avuncular benevolence, divesting him of what Stowe calls his native “grave and steady good sense” (27).  Naturally, these four animated images of Uncle Tom remain inescapably racist and, to our sensibilities, repugnant, in that they mulct the literary character of the resident (if problematic) dignity that Stowe initially ascribes to him, adhering instead to various permutations of a ubiquitous and unflattering caricature—from the enfeebled “nice old man” in Uncle Tom’s Bungalow to the bloated wag of Uncle Tom’s Cabana.  However, the crux of the (ostensibly) comic content of these cartoons lies precisely in that aggressive manipulation of Stowe’s narrative and characters.  The disjunction of the original “hero” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the animators’ satirical renderings provides a comic declension, in turn suggesting that the audience retained the potential—and indeed, the cultural sophistication—to discern the difference between the two competing images. 

Michelle Wallace

Department of English

Emory University

Atlanta, Georgia 30322

Works Cited

Avery, Tex, dir.  Uncle Tom’s Bungalow.  Warner Brothers, 1937.

—.  Uncle Tom’s Cabana.  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1947.

Cohen, Paul.  Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997.

Rasinki, Connie, dir.  Eliza On Ice.  Terrytoons, 1944.

Scheib, Ronnie.  “Tex Arcana: The Cartoons of Tex Avery.”  The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology.  Ed. Gerald Peary and Danny Peary.  New York: Dutton, 1980.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852.  New York: Random House, 1985.

Terry, Paul, dir.  Uncle Tom and Little Eva.  Van Beuren, 1932.