July 10 - The Fox and the Hound

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On this day, in 1981, Walt Disney Pictures released its 24^th animated feature, The Fox and the Hound. Based on a novel of the same name, Fox the movie began its journey in 1977 when Woolie Reitherman, one of Walt’s Nine Old Men and a long-time Disney director and producer, read the story. Of course he may have only chosen it because his son had a pet fox once, but whatever the reason, Woolie would come to regret that choice (even though what transpired over the next few years would probably have happened no matter what movie was in production at the time).

Things started off well enough. Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, two more of the Nine Old Men, took the lead of a team made up of a new generation of animators including John Laseter, Brad Bird, John Musker, Ron Clements, Tim Burton, the list goes on and includes most of the names of the people responsible for the Disney Renaissance period a decade later. Fox was a transitional film between two generations of great animators and, like most hand offs between the old and new guards, it did not go smoothly, but not because of conflicts among the animators.

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For their part, Ollie and Frank had finished most of their animation by 1978 when they both retired and left the finishing of the film to the young bucks. Maybe they had confidence in the next generation, maybe they saw what was coming and didn’t want to watch first hand. Around the same time, studio management, under Ron Miller, began to be unhappy with some of Woolie’s decisions and added a co-director to the picture, Art Stevens. Art had been an animator since the Forties and had just co-directed The Rescuers. As Woolie was most likely still smarting from what was essentially a public slap down, it quickly became apparent that the two directors had very different visions on what kind of film they were making.

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It’s hard to tell who had lost their way more in this dynamic, the aging director, who was running out of ideas (as we shall see in a moment) or Disney management, who would next produce the debacle known as The Black Cauldron. How a movie got made at all with those two factions constantly fighting is something of a minor miracle. Looking at Woolie’s insanity first, at some point in 1979, he decided that the film’s second act needed a boost. At the point that Todd, the fox, is left in the woods, Woolie wanted to insert two cranes, played by Phil Harris and Charro, singing a song to him called “Scoobie-Doobie Doobie Doo, Let Your Body Turn Goo.” He even went as far as having Charro record soundtracks and live reference footage before Art declared it a terrible idea and, through management (and just plain good sense), got the scene cut.

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Even though they were right about the cranes, Studio management wasn’t all about making good decisions at this point in company history. A large group of animators was becoming highly dissatisfied with how things were being run in general. The grumbling came to a head on September 13, 1979 when Don Bluth and fifteen other animators suddenly resigned their positions and asked that their names be taken off the credits of Fox. With 17% of the animation staff gone, Disney had to scramble to hire new people to fill the gaps and finish the movie. And somewhere in the middle of all that, Woolie had his last fight with management as director, got pulled from the position, was relegated to a producer credit only and the release date was pushed back from Christmas 1980 to Summer 1981.

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When it was finally released, in spite of all the infighting and behind the scenes drama, The Fox and the Hound received mostly favorable reviews. Critics generally said it wasn’t anything particularly special but it did show glimpses of that old Disney magic at times. The fight scene between Todd, Copper and the bear is generally cited as a masterpiece of animation and everyone loves Pearl Bailey’s performance as Big Mama the owl. Financially, Fox did okay as well. Because of the delays in production, costs for the picture totaled $12 million, making it the most expensive animated film ever made up to that point, even adjusted for inflation (which is kind of laughable today; animated movies routinely cost over $100 million to produce versus Fox’s $35 million in 2019 dollars). Fox grossed a comfortable $39.9 million in its initial run and an additional $23.5 million in a rerelease seven years later, making it a profitable if somewhat ho-hum addition to the Disney family.

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In the end, The Fox and the Hound holds an awkward place in Disney history. It marked the end of the era of Walt’s Nine Old Men. Woolie Reitherman was the only one who remained by the time of its release and Fox left a bitter taste in his mouth. He spent the next few years working on a handful of projects that never moved into actual production and was killed in a car accident in 1985.  The next crop of animated genius was in place but still had to go through the painful valley of The Black Cauldron before they would start to come into their own and launch the Disney Renaissance. The baton might have been passed and audiences might have been mildly entertained, but no one who was running could really say they’d enjoyed the race.