The Fox and the Hound

On the data. Two films, and the first one is a hinge in the studio's history. Disney's animation department in the late 1970s was still largely the people Walt Disney had hired, several of them past retirement age, and this was the film on which they trained the intake that would run the studio later. The names that came through it include Brad Bird, John Lasseter, Tim Burton and Glen Keane, which is an absurd roster for one production. It is also the film Don Bluth quit. In September 1979, with the film unfinished, Bluth and about a dozen animators left to start their own studio, which was roughly a sixth of the department. The release was pushed back a year. Bluth's studio then made The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and The Land Before Time, which competed directly with Disney through the 1980s and for a while beat it. Daniel Mannix's 1967 novel is worth knowing about because of how far the film moves from it. In the book there is no friendship. The hound hunts the fox for most of the story, the fox dies of exhaustion, and the hound is shot by his owner at the end. Disney took the premise and inverted it. The 1981 film still has the sequence most people remember, which is the fox being abandoned in a wildlife preserve in the rain. It was a modest success and sat awkwardly between eras, too soft for the 1980s and not made by the people who had defined the 1960s. The sequel, in 2006, is a direct-to-video midquel about a travelling country band. It has nothing to do with the ending of the first film, which is deliberate.

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