The 1981 half-sheet poster
When Disney’s The Fox and the Hound first opened in 1981, film critic Roger Ebert noted, “…for all of its familiar qualities, this movie marks something of a departure for the Disney studio, and its movement is in an interesting direction. The Fox and the Hound is one of those relatively rare Disney animated features that contains a useful lesson for its younger audiences. It’s not just cute animals and frightening adventures and a happy ending; it’s also a rather thoughtful meditation on how society determines our behavior.”
The film combined elements that audiences would expect with a deep message beneath, and it took quite a bit to get The Fox and the Hound to the screen.
In a well-documented and pivotal moment in animation history, during production on The Fox and the Hound in September of 1979, Don Bluth led a walkout of a group of fourteen animators (including himself) from the Disney Studio.
These artists disagreed with the direction of Disney’s slate of future animated projects and looked to create a studio of their own, which Bluth would, of course, do, creating such features as 1982’s The Secret of NIMH and An American Tail (1986).
The production of The Fox and the Hound, which celebrates its 45th anniversary this summer, was hindered, due to this. Talent quickly marched out the door, forcing the Disney Studio to push the feature’s release date from Christmas of 1980 to summer 1981.
The team that remained on The Fox and the Hound included such legendary Disney veterans as Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Art Stevens, and Wolfgang Reitherman, who worked closely with a new generation of Disney artists to make sure that The Fox and the Hound moved forward.
As a project, The Fox and the Hound first surfaced at Disney in 1967, when the studio reportedly bought the rights to the novel of the same name by author Daniel P. Mannix.
The film would be co-directed by Stevens with newcomers Richard Rich and Ted Berman (making their directorial debuts), and centered on an orphaned fox pup named Tod, who becomes friends with a hound dog puppy named Copper.
As they grow up and realize that they aren’t meant to be friends, Tod and Copper struggle to hold on to their friendship as they face what the world expects from them and what their hearts are telling them.
The Fox and the Hound continued a Disney tradition of casting well-known actors as voices. Mickey Rooney voiced adult Tod, while Kurt Russell (a Disney mainstay with his years in the live-action “Dexter Riley” college comedies) played adult Copper. Singer Pearl Bailey was Big Mama, the caring owl who finds Tod when he is orphaned.
Rounding out the cast were veteran character actors and Studio regulars – Jack Albertson played the hunter Amos Slade and Dick Bakalyan was Dinky the bird, Paul (Tigger) Winchell as Boomer the woodpecker, Jeannette Nolan as Widow Tweed, Pat Buttram as the dog Chief, John McIntyre as a badger, and John (Piglet) Fiedler as a porcupine.
As pups, the two title characters were voiced by child actors Keith Mitchell (who would later change his last name to Coogan) and Corey Feldman as Copper.
One scene, with a musical number, was to feature two cranes, voiced by noted Spanish-American singer Charo and Disney voice regular Phil Harris, but was eventually dropped.
Additionally, The Fox and the Hound provided an arena for the newer generation of Disney animators, such as Brad Bird and Tim Burton.
The final 1981 one-sheet lobby poster
As Frank and Ollie wrote: “He added swirling mist from a waterfall, savage scenes of brute force for the bear, strength and darting moves for the fox and the hound. It was a thrilling climax to the picture and set up the emotional impact of the rebirth of the friendship between the two animals. Glen’s concept when far beyond the ordinary story sketches that he had been given and established him as a top directing animator for the new era.”
Released on July 10, 1981, The Fox and the Hound is fondly remembered forty-five years later, not just by those who first saw it and grew up with it that summer in theaters, but subsequent generations, as well, who have appreciated the artistry, the characters and a story in which, as Mr. Ebert observed, was about friendship and caring overcoming pre-conceived prejudices that others may impose on us.
Like The Rescuers before it, The Fox and the Hound serves as another example of a new generation of artists at Disney showcasing their talents during a challenging time at the Studio, where just a decade later, a Renaissance would be underway.
Michael Lyons is a freelance writer, specializing in film, television, and pop culture. He is the author of the book, Drawn to Greatness: Disney’s Animation Renaissance, which chronicles the amazing growth at the Disney animation studio in the 1990s. In addition to Animation Scoop and Cartoon Research, he has contributed to Remind Magazine, Cinefantastique, Animation World Network and Disney Magazine. He also writes a blog, Screen Saver: A Retro Review of TV Shows and Movies of Yesteryear and his interviews with a number of animation legends have been featured in several volumes of the books, Walt’s People. You can visit Michael’s web site Words From Lyons at: 
Regarding the voice cast, it should also be noted that Sandy Duncan performed the role of Vixy, the love interest for Tod.
There is a glaring error in the script regarding the naming of Tod. The Widow states that because the fox is such a toddler, she is naming him Tod. But actually “Tod” is the Scottish word for “fox.” (See Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Mr. Tod” for confirmation.)
“The Fox and the Hound” was definitely a departure for Disney. Although they hedged their bet by playing it safe with well-known celebrity voices, by using generic designs for the human characters, and by loading the screenplay with unnecessary and sometimes irrelevant gags, ultimately the story that is told is gut-wrenchingly emotional. And instead of the usual happy ending, the story concludes with the problems still largely unresolved and with many lingering questions. This was a very bold move, especially for 80’s animation.
The book by Dan Mannix is even darker. The personalities of the fox and the hound are never fleshed out, and the characters are not anthropomorphized but rather depicted as a real fox and a real hound. There is not so much as a hint of friendship. Ultimately the hound fulfills what it is meant to do to the fox. Considering this powerful source material, it is amazing how the Disney people transformed it into family friendly cinema. Though I have never personally met Dan Mannix, he and I were members of the same club for a number of years and I have read several of his other writings, many of which are in a much lighter vein.
For me the most memorable character is Pearl Bailey’s owl. The great lady gave quite a few interviews at the time in which she seemed to express delight at bringing a Disney character to life. There is some footage showing how she was also used at least partially as a live-action model reference for the character.
There was an additional bittersweet factor in this film for me. I first saw “The Fox and the Hound” with a girl I had been going out with for some time. I was saving up money for an engagement ring. She informed me that same summer of her engagement–to someone else. Broken-hearted, I used some of the money I had been saving for the purchase of some record albums, as a means of easing my bottomless grief. One was the soundtrack to the film of “Camelot,” one was a Judy Garland album, and the third was the storyteller album of “The Fox and the Hound.” Not sure why I wanted this reminder of one of our last dates, but it was also the last time I purchased a record album with the Disneyland Records label on it. Shortly thereafter, I embarked on a theatrical career, which didn’t ease the pain but took my life in different directions.
There is, of course, a long tradition of adaptations of novels taking great liberties with the source material, but I’m not sure any adaptation varies more greatly than The Fox and the Hound.
i will say that Bambi is a hard departure from the original novel.
In the novel, it’s established early that man is dangerous and so is the meadow.
Bambi is raised by another doe after the deer drive that kills his mother.
There’s a fawn captured by the man that returns, without fear of men, and preaches about how great the men are. Then a hunter shoots him in the guts during hunting season.
Ultimately, Bambi and the old stag see a dead man and realize that a force above man exists, and thus God must exist.
Disney… didn’t follow the plot too closely.
My family owned this on VHS when I was young, but we rarely watched it. I finally took the opportunity to watch it start-to-finish as an adult so I could finally grasp it in the context of the period it was made in.
“Instead of the usual happy ending, the story concludes with the problems still largely unresolved and with many lingering questions. This was a very bold move, especially for 80’s animation.”
Part of me wonders if that was a result of the muddled production schedule due to the Bluth walkout and the alleged insistence by Reitherman that the character of Chief not die. When I watched the film, my imagined alternate ending was thus: Copper refuses to let Amos kill Tod, and the bear attacks. Thanks to Tod’s intervention Amos survives… but only just. He then goes to the Widow Tweed, hat in hand, explaining that after such a harrowing experience (motivated by his pig-headedness such that he even broke the law by invading the nature reserve) he’s lost any motivation he had to make his living through killing animals, and he’d like to try his hand at farming, if she’ll have him. You can still end with some gag in the dairy barn showing Amos is still a crotchety old rascal, but at least it wouldn’t end with the sad supposition that Amos learned nothing from his close call and is probably going to get him and his dogs killed someday…
“Considering this powerful source material, it is amazing how the Disney people transformed it into family friendly cinema.”
Amazing, but not surprising since the same group of leading animators basically did the exact same thing with ‘Bambi’ back in the 1940s.
For most of its runtime, The Fox and the Hound is a serviceable Disney feature: pleasant visuals, appealing characters, hit-or-miss gags, etc. Then Amos and Copper encounter the bear, and Glen Keane treats us to one of the most gripping climaxes in a Disney cartoon, followed by a moving, understated, bittersweet resolution. The ending doesn’t quite lift the film into the pantheon of Disney greats, but it does make it a film every animation fan should check out at least one.
I did not see this movie until many years had passed after its release. I was shocked to discover that it was based on a story by Daniel P. Mannix, whom I knew as the author of several nonfiction books on some of the most egregious examples of human cruelty through the ages, told in gruesome detail: BLACK CARGOES, about the slave trade; THOSE ABOUT TO DIE, about the Roman games; and THE HISTORY OF TORTURE, whose title is self-explanatory. The idea that one of his stories had been adapted into an animated Disney film seemed to me as improbable as, say, Herschell Gordon Lewis directing a children’s movie featuring characters from Mother Goose — which he actually did, but that’s another story.
It’s not exactly a “feel-good” movie. Sure, they try to leaven the mood with a subplot, if you can call it that, about two birds chasing a caterpillar for a full year before it finally transforms into a butterfly; and there are a couple of comic interludes accompanied by lively bluegrass music, like chase scenes in “The Dukes of Hazzard”. But in the end, we see that the heroes’ childhood declarations of eternal friendship did not, and could not, work out in the long run. If a pact of mutual non-aggression is the best thing the fox and the hound could hope for, then what hope is there for the world? It’s like “West Side Story” ending with Anita telling Maria, “See? I was right! This is what happens when you don’t stick to your own kind!”
Glen Keane has a condition called aphantasia, which impairs the ability to form mental images. As such, he relies on live-action reference to a much greater extent than other animators do. This, of course, was not an option for him when animating the animals in “The Fox and the Hound”. However, producer Woolie Reitherman’s old habit of recycling animation from earlier Disney features provided Keane with the reference he needed. I wasn’t aware that he referred to the dinosaur footage from “Fantasia”, but I can definitely see the hunting dogs from “Bambi” in the film’s climactic scene.
In it’s original theatrical release, this film was double-billed with a rather odd documentary featurette, Once Upon a Mouse, wherein random clips of Disney animated shorts and features were shown unidentified and completely out of context, with no narration or title cards to explain their significance in the studio’s history. However, coming before home video releases and the launch of the Disney Channel, this was a rare opportunity for fans to see, even briefly, classic cartoons on the big screen that hadn’t had exposure in years.
The behind the scenes making of the film (along with a very early look on the production of “The Black Cauldron”) was shown in the 1981 anthology series episode “The Illusion of Life” which also was a loose tie-in to Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson’s then recently released book. I have an early memory seeing it syndicated on network television in the early 1990’s. It was released on VHS in 1986 along with the first episode of “The Wonderful World of Color”. Unfortunately, unlike the later, it is not on Disney+.
Good movie. If Chief actually died however…… would have been a great movie.
I don’t know. That choice certainly would have made it a better move, a more honest movie, but to be truly great they would have needed to tone down the Tweety & Sylvester antics with the birds and caterpillar (or drop that subplot entirely).
I enjoyed The Fox And The Hound when it was first released. I didn’t read the Daniel P. Mannix book until a little after.
Most of the characters I liked (I wonder what Mannix himself thought of the movie). Although I think today we could have done without the birds (except for Big Mama)..
With the current Disney trend of making live action/cg remakes of their old animated features, I would love to see them tackle The Fox & The Hound, but leave out Dinky, Boomer, and Squeaks.