A South Disney didn’t dream of

Midway through Kara Walker’s gently astounding new animated film-installation in the Gallery at REDCAT, there’s a brief, live-action interlude. Since the film is executed in the manner of a grainy silent movie of indeterminate vintage, a title card introduces the break: “Bess, a comely Negress, takes her master’s likeness.”

It’s easy to see the interlude as a self-portrait. The New York-based artist, 35, has developed a wide following -- ever since her noteworthy emergence from the pack in the 1997 Whitney Biennial -- for biting wall murals composed from cut-paper silhouettes. The scene shows a young African American woman, her hair covered in a do-rag, wielding a pair of scissors and cutting out in black paper a profile of a white man, seen in silhouette sitting before her.

For the film, the interlude is pivotal. When, with skill and finesse, a young black artist follows the outlines of white experience, a familiar masterslave relationship is poetically cast in artistic terms. Her installation is partly about upending that relationship. Her scissors create a silhouette cutout of the type that populates the rest of the animated movie, but simultaneously the “comely Negress” asserts her commanding authorship of the film-installation.

That marvelously conceived installation is a harrowing tale of American history. Titled “Kara E. Walker’s ‘Song of the South,’ ” the show invents a kind of back story to the famous Disney movie of the same name.

The Oscar-winning 1946 Disney film is both beloved and loathed. (Because Walker’s show is being hosted at REDCAT -- the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater -- a nicely ironic symmetry emerges.)

Notable for the award-winning performance of James Baskett as Uncle Remus; for the bouncy, carefree tune “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”; and for exceptional animation sequences, the movie is a classic. Despite this, Disney has refused to release “Song of the South” on home video or DVD -- evidently for fear of controversy over its glossy rendition of life in the post-Civil War American South.

The movie’s advertising campaign, billing it as “the happy, heartwarming picture of the Old South,” suggests the degree to which it sentimentalized the traumatic era of Reconstruction. (Folklorist Patricia A. Turner famously denigrated the otherwise charming movie as taking place in “dream time.”)

Joel Chandler Harris, who wrote the original Uncle Remus yarns, did base the resourceful characters of the briar patch on traditional African stories of the trickster. In the film, Uncle Remus tells short morality tales -- deftly animated as the antics of Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Bear and Br’er Fox in the briar patch -- to a wide-eyed young white boy dressed in Little Lord Fauntleroy velvet and lace.

The live-action interlude at the center of Walker’s piece creates a role reversal, nicely complicating the paternalistic, idealizing aspects of the Disney film. As for the rest of her roughly 15-minute animation, Walker takes anything but a sentimental route.

The installation is composed of a circle of trees, dripping with Spanish moss, that Walker built from plywood theatrical flats painted black. An entry sign warns, “Folks is advised: Dis Aint fer Chillun.” You enter a clearing -- although clarity is not immediate.

At the left, a rear-projection film loop is shown on a white scrim stretched between two trees. A shadowy mystery play, its imagery and narrative are impossible to fathom.

A second rear-projection loop to the right displays a continuous chain of linked black figures, all nearly lifeless. They are being dragged across the bottom of the screen.

Across the clearing, the main event unfolds. Using silhouette puppets manipulated on wooden sticks, examples of which are also displayed nearby, Walker’s film tells a mythic tale of black America in eight lyrical yet disturbing scenes.

Slaves are tossed overboard from a sailing ship. They float to a “motherland,” which rises up from the sea in the guise of a black giant and swallows their bodies whole. They slide down his throat and travel through his intestinal tract, eventually to be defecated into a pile on the ground.

From the pile a strong, beautiful black man arises. Enter King Cotton. The black man scoops up a white plantation owner from the earth, and the two engage in protracted sexual intercourse. The slave’s belly swells into a pregnant mound, just before Walker’s live-action interlude arrives. The man is poised to give birth -- but the artist suddenly emerges as the guiding hand, appearing to re-create her master’s image.

However, the film’s final four scenes wrestle the story away from that expectation. Instead, a viewer is tossed into a very different sort of briar patch.

A black midwife attends the birth of the black man’s child. She rips it from his loins and tosses it over her shoulder and into the soil. Layered voices rise over a spiritual on the soundtrack, as a young girl recites her teacher’s lessons. On the screen the “seedling child” is watered and grows into a tall tree; meanwhile, a young white boy arrives to beg Uncle Remus to tell him tales.

Suddenly, the flickering scene in the movie shifts: You go from in front of the shadow screen to behind it -- from watching the puppets to witnessing the puppet mistress. There, Walker shows herself unfolding a horrific story of lynching. Bodies are strung up on the now-sturdy tree, which has grown from the unnatural soil of American history.

As the paper-thin slips representing black corpses flutter, it is hard not to register shock. As Walker dispenses with simplistic posturing, the dangling figures metamorphose into strange fruit indeed. A saga of human degradation -- and of the easy passage of mythologies from one generation to another -- her resonant shadow play is both melancholic and powerful.

After watching Walker’s version of “The Song of the South,” I looked up the history of lynching in America. According to journalist Laura Wexler, the shocking murder of two black couples in Walton County, Ga., in July 1946 was the last of more than 3,000 mob lynchings of African Americans in the United States. The barbarous assault ignited a national outcry, prompting President Truman to begin a push for civil-rights changes that ultimately desegregated the military.

J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI investigated the crime, but nobody was indicted, nobody was arrested, and nobody was ever punished. As recently as last January, a state senator from Georgia pleaded with prosecutors to take the decades-old case to a grand jury.

Four months after the brutal Georgia lynching, almost to the day, Disney premiered its “happy, heartwarming picture of the Old South” at the Fox Theater in Atlanta.

Walker’s unhappy, heart-wrenching picture offers bittersweet context.

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‘Kara E. Walker’s “Song of the South” ’

Where: The Gallery at REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles

When: Noon to 6 p.m. or curtain time; closed Mondays

Ends: Oct. 23

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 237-2800 www.redcat.org