The Fox and the Hound

In Daniel P. Mannix’s 1967 novel the fox and the hound are never friends. The hound’s owner spends years training him to hunt that fox; after a chase lasting a whole day the fox drops dead of exhaustion, and the owner, forced into a nursing home that will not take dogs, leads the hound outside with his shotgun. Mannix spent over a year observing a pair of foxes and talking to hunters and game wardens. Richard Rich and two co-directors keep that skeleton and remove every death. In the novel Chief fails to clear the train and dies; in the film he only breaks a leg. Art Stevens, one of the directors, gave the reason: they had never killed a main character in a Disney film and were not going to start. Production was shaken when Don Bluth left the studio with his group in September 1979, pushing release from Christmas 1980 to summer 1981. A younger generation filled the gap: Glen Keane, Brad Bird, John Musker, Tim Burton and Henry Selick all worked on it. Keane animated the closing bear fight. A good fit if you can sit through a gentler first stretch knowing the best drawn passage is the closing bear fight. Not for viewers expecting the novel’s hardness, because the film stops where the book keeps going.