The Fox and the Hound (1981)
Directed by Ted Berman
When a feisty little fox named Tod is adopted into a farm family, he quickly becomes friends with a fun and adorable hound puppy named Copper. Life is full of hilarious adventures until Copper is expected to take on his role as a hunting dog -- and the object of his search is his best friend!
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What critics compared The Fox and the Hound to
For Buck, who’s been in Disney’s animation trenches since 1981’s “The Fox and the Hound,” “Frozen” is his third feature — and his best — as a director.
Instead, writer-directors Chris Buck (a veteran Disney animator with credits dating back to “The Fox and the Hound”) and Jennifer Lee (who co-scripted “Wreck-It Ralph”) give us a more conventional tale of two sisters, younger Anna (Kristen Bell) and elder Elsa (Idina Menzel), heirs to the enchanted Scandinavian kingdom of Arendelle (also a return of sorts to Disney tradition after the dutiful PC dues-paying of “Pocahontas,” “Mulan” and “The Princess and the Frog”).
She and co-director Chris Buck, a Disney veteran whose credits date back to The Fox and the Hound, make a compatible team who understand how to balance the traditional and the new.
Both directors came out of Disney: Chris Buck goes back as far as The Fox and the Hound (1981) and has extensive credits in cel animation but slim computer animation credits.
It recalls the classic Disney animated features The Sword and the Stone, The Black Cauldron, and The Fox and the Hound (that the picture was originally titled The Bear and the Bow implies the similarities are intentional).
And while all of those movies have surprises, you wouldn’t be surprised by anything else that happens in Alpha and Omega either, because you have seen movies like Ice Age, The Fox and the Hound, Happy Feet, Open Season and so on.
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His whole career was founded on two stones: his characters like the bear in The Fox and the Hound or the Beast, large and imposing physical presences that dominate and threaten; and his characters like Ariel and Aladdin, characters with a tremendous collection of facial expressions, delicate and subtle, and greatly evocative.
The best way I can think of to describe the plot is a metrosexual update of the Disney classic “The Fox and the Hound”, in which two best friends sadly learn over time that their roles in life as adults will pit them against one another as mortal enemies.
The Fox and the Hound, released in 1981, would prove to be Disney's last solid effort prior to their current renaissance (which kicked off a few years later with the release of The Little Mermaid), and there's little doubt that the film possesses the feel and tone of the studio's earlier work.