The Fox and the Hound
|  Disney’s anthropomorphic bromance The Fox and the Hound is not one of the studio’s best efforts, but nonetheless it remains a fascinating product of an era of upheaval as well as a meaningful statement about the nature of prejudice. The film was produced during a particularly tumultuous time at Disney when the old guard was retiring and a new crop of animators was taking the reigns. As a result, the film has always been a bit of a mixed bag, bearing obvious hallmarks of the classical mode of Disney animation while also trying to find a tone that was more in keeping with the constantly shifting sensibilities of American cinema at the time (it went into production the same year that Star Wars became a box-office smash and helped bring to an end a decade of darker, grittier filmmaking).The film is loosely (and I mean loosely) adapted from the award-winning 1967 novel of the same title by Daniel P. Mannix, whose wide-ranging life pursuits included everything from exotic animal training, to circus performing, to chronicling the history of Roman gladiatorial games. About the only things the novel and the film have in common are the title, the names of a few characters, and a few situations, most of which are essentially repurposed on screen. Otherwise, the two are starkly different, with Mannix’s grim novel focused on realistically rendering animal behavior while also commenting on the inexorable nature of human “progress,” while the film spins an entirely new story about unlikely friends trying to resist the established order of things. The main characters are Tod, a fox kit that is rescued and raised by the elderly Widow Tweed (Jeanette Nolan) after his mother is killed by hunters, and Copper, a bloodhound pup that is being raised next door by a cantankerous old hunter named Amos Slade (Jack Albertson) and his older dog Chief (Pat Buttram). Tod (voiced as a child by Keith Coogan) and Copper (voiced as a child by Corey Feldman) develop a friendship because they are unaware that they should be antagonists, which plays as an obvious commentary on how racism, sexism, and every other kind of -ism must be learned. Copper is then taken away for the winter by Amos and trained to be a hunting dog, and when he returns as an adult (now voiced by Mickey Rooney), he must reject his friendship with Tod (now voiced by Kurt Russell) because he has learned to hunt foxes, not frolic with them. The relatively thin nature of the film’s parable-like narrative is padded out with a handful of secondary characters whose primary goal is to fill out the running time with oddly truncated songs and slapstick gags. This is particularly true of a thematically connected but otherwise useless subplot involving the Coyote-and-Roadrunner antics of two odd-couple birds, a finch named Dinky (Dick Bakalyan) and a woodpecker named Boomer (Paul Winchell), trying to catch a caterpillar that later startles them by turning into a butterfly. There are also a few forgettable songs, most of which are sung by Big Mama (Pearl Bailey), a matronly owl who is responsible for saving Tod’s life; the manner in which they are haphazardly shoehorned in suggests that directors Ted Berman, Richard Rich, and Art Stevens felt compelled to give the film a musical dimension in keeping with previous Disney efforts, but simply didn’t have their hearts in it. Of course, The Fox and the Hound’s weaknesses are often balanced by its strengths, including a nearly silent opening credits sequence that captivates and establishes a compelling tone that the rest of the film, with its uneven storytelling, is unable to maintain; nevertheless, those opening moments, which depict Tod’s mother fleeing through the forest while unseen hunters stalk her, create one of the most visually and tonally impressive sequences in any Disney film. When the animators aren’t trying too hard with the slapstick, the film can also be quite funny and charming, especially in the early sequences of Tod and Copper playing and any scene in which the Widow Tweed stands up to Amos (the manner in which he constantly refers to her as “woman” suggests that the film’s subtext regarding equality shouldn’t be limited to race). The animation is at its best in the protracted climax that finds Tod and Copper facing off against a monstrous bear, an unexpected moment of life-and-death in which each risks his own life to save the other’s, thus re-establishing their friendship despite their “enemy” status. The connections between The Fox and the Hound and Bambi (1942) are unmistakable and obviously intended, and in its best moments the former approximates the naturalistic beauty of the latter, albeit without its complete conviction and commitment to the idea of the animated film as pastoral poem. And that, if anything, is the film’s problem: It is trying to be too many things at once and doesn’t achieve any of them with the power and dexterity of Disney’s best films. This shouldn’t be too surprising given the film’s production history, which began with veteran animator Don Bluth and a number of other animations jumping ship to form their own rival studio, which for almost a decade produced arguably better films (including 1982’s The Secret of NIHM) than the house that Mickey built. Disney had already lost all but a few of the legendary “Nine Old Men” who had been with the studio since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), thus the majority of the work on The Fox and the Hound was turned over to a largely untested group of young animators who essentially cut their teeth on the film before becoming the new vanguard of Disney’s second golden era. In The Fox and the Hound you can see fleeting glimpses of what was to come, but unfortunately not quite enough to cohere into a better film.
Copyright ©2011 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Overall Rating: 
(2.5)
