After doing my review of The Rescuers the other day I was looking forward to whatever movie was coming next. Fox in the Hound is a movie I know I watched as a kid, but honestly, I remember nothing about it beyond the cover. Having watched it now, I see why I remembered so little about it. In a lot of ways, it's not really much better than the Rescuers.
Things do happen in this movie though. A fox loses his mother to a hunter and is raised by an old lady. He makes friends with a dog being trained as a hunting dog, and when they get older they find themselves at odds because of the Hunter Dogs' upbringing. A mix of that and Chief, an older hunting dog, getting hurt badly chasing after the fox, you have the basis of something that could be interesting.
The problem is the characters are really basic and hard to get invested in. There is also an out of nowhere love interest that comes right at the end, which adds nothing, and a lot of time wasted on a side plot of two birds trying to catch a caterpillar to eat. They can never catch it because they are idiots.
Now there are some things to like about the movie, and that is there are some fairly charming moments sprinkled throughout. The Climax is also very well animated and has a lot of tension behind it. The movie has all the things it needs to be good, it just doesn't seem to follow through on any of it. Too much time is spent on things unrelated to the relationship between the Fox and the Hound, so you never really get a chance to get invested in it. And if you can't get invested in it, everything in the movie falls flat.
I'm glad they were trying something different with this film than occurred in other movies Disney has done, and the foundation for a good movie was here. But the problem is it all falls flat, and nothing interesting happens in the entire movies run. Outside of a few funny scenes, there is just nothing here to hold your attention.
