The 1981 animated feature The Fox And The Hound captured a Walt Disney Company in flux. The year it went into production, Don Bluth and 11 other animators left Disney's studios to form their own company; around the same time, the last of Disney's "nine old men," artists who'd largely been with the company since Snow White, died or retired. A chipper six-minute featurette on Fox And The Hound's 20th-anniversary-edition DVD boasts that this was the film where Disney's first-generation filmmakers passed the baton, but it doesn't mention the effect these trials had on the picture—which was delayed a year and still bears visible scars—or on the studio, which headed into a creative slump that wouldn't end until The Little Mermaid, eight years later. Still, for all its flaws, Fox And The Hound has its unassuming pleasures. It's no masterpiece, but it's much more than a test feature for a new crop of filmmakers.
