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The answers will not be found here; children and adults alike deserve to see the film and be surprised by its resolution. But it can be said that by film's end an uneasy truce obtains. Like pairs off with like, and the childhood friends are last seen in their separate worlds, awash in rueful nostalgia and a musical score that ends in a minor key. Viewers should be less melancholy. They need not leave this film comparing it unfavorably with the great Disney films of everyone's youth.
Instead, they can savor the serious pleasures of The Fox and the Hound and, with the rise of a talented new generation of Disney animators, look for greater pleasures to come. —By Richard Corliss