So Dear to My Heart (1948)

Largely forgotten Disney film is mostly live action with a surprisingly few animated supplement sequences. The story is of a young boy living in circa 1903 Indiana who raises a black sheep from lamb hood to competition in the county fair. Film features Burl Ives, Beulah Bondi, and Bobby Driscoll, who would later service as both the voice and physical model for Peter Pan in the Disney movie of the same name. Unlike Peter Pan however not a lot of people remember this movie, it has had very sporadic video and DVD release and one of the few broadcast entities that remembers it is BYU-TV which is how I saw it. Which brings me to how incredible 'white' this movie is, the only racial minority in the film is the black sheep. I'm not necessarily criticizing this, but the white protestant assumptions of this film now feel staggering in a era of multi-ethnic Disney princesses and lesbian couples on the Disney Channel. Beulah Bondi is extremely patient with that sheep. **1/2