
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 10, 1990                   TAG: 9003102756
SECTION: SPECTATOR                    PAGE: 11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Baltimore Evening Sun
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ARTWORK DISTINGUISHES 'BRER RABBIT'

Walt Disney's magical animators of the 1940s and '50s stamped his bright vision of the world so forcefully on so many traditional stories that it is still hard to accept them when approached by new artists.

Take Joel Chandler Harris' fanciful dialect tales of the animal kingdom populated by Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and Brer Bear. In 1946, Disney animated three of the classics in the Oscar-winning "Song of the South" and gave us the perpetual image of these characters.

Now there's the children's show on the Showtime cable network: "Brer Rabbit and the Wonderful Tar Baby." The newest edition of Showtime's "Storybook Classic" series has airings on Monday and March 20.

The story, as read in dialect by series host Danny Glover, seems more or less the familiar tale of how Brer Rabbit outsmarted Brer Fox by pleading not to be flung into the briar patch. But the artwork is a long stretch from the benign good humor of the Disney characters.

As illustrated by Henrik Drescher in a storybook animation style - as in a slide show, the action moves haltingly between fixed paintings - Brer Fox is truly predatory and Brer Rabbit wears glasses and seems somewhat like the hurrying rabbit in "Alice in Wonderland" (also done by Disney, of course, in 1951).

The style is not quite abstract, but it has elements of the surreal that bring a different tone to the story. Further, original music by blues artist Taj Mahal, on guitar and banjo, adds a more authentically rural Southern flavor than Disney's "Zip a Dee Doo Dah."

It is also nice to hear the folksy wisdom of Harris' work, which was in eclipse for a time because of perceived racism. In fact, Media Monitor remembers when some maintained that the Tar Baby in the story was a derogatory characterization of blacks in general.

Perhaps we are beyond such hyper-sensitivity, for that interpretation is impossible to see in this adaptation. The Tar Baby is merely a sticky trap to snare the wily rabbit, and the story's moral is about how to use one's brains to escape a dilemma.

by CNB