Recently a question from my childhood has returned to plague me such that I could get no peace. Why is it that in certain Disney films foxes wear trousers and greatcoats and walk among human beings, while in others they dwell naked in the woods and flee from the coming of Man? What great calamity befell the Fox Civilization that caused them to lose the power of speech? Whence Disney Fox Carthage? I took a look at the foxes that appear in Disney films over the years and found a disturbing trend: threaded throughout the separate narratives was a second, shadowy backstory of loss and cultural degradation and foxes.
Movie: Pinocchio
Fox(es) Present: J. “Honest John” Worthington Foulfellow
Level of Animal Sentience: Complete, in John’s case. He wears clothes and walks on his hind legs and is capable of telling lies in the English language. However, the boys who turn into donkeys become incapable of human speech, and Monstro the whale appears to be completely insensate. He eats and roars and swims and wears no clothes at all.
Degree of Animal Autonomy: Mixed. John appears to live among humans as an equal, but the donkeys are subservient to them.
Movie: Robin Hood
Fox(es) Present: Robin Hood, Maid Marian, various background characters
Animal Sentience: Complete. The high-water mark for fox civilization. Foxes compete in archery, overturn kings, are members of the landed gentry, and make friends with bears.
Animal Autonomy: Total. Foxes, lions, mice, wolves and turtles have developed their own, completely functional society without any help from or interactions with humans. It is unclear if all self-aware animals have become vegetarians, since no non-sentient animals are seen in the film, and presumably Robin Hood does not eat Maid Marian’s chicken handmaiden.
Movie: The Sword in the Stone
Fox(es) Present: Mad Madam Mim briefly transforms into a fox during her Wizard Duel with Merlin, although she retains her trademark mop of grey hair
Animal Sentience: N/A. She only appears to be a fox; she remains a wizard. Other animals, however, appear capable of speech (Archimedes) and of romantic love (that sad squirrel who falls in love with Wart in his squirrel morph).
Animal Autonomy: Mixed. Archimedes is clearly subservient to Merlin, although not necessarily unhappily so; other animals appear to have their own society, unconnected to the goings-on of nearby humans.
Movie: The Fox and the Hound
Fox(es) Present: Tod, Vixey, Tod’s murdered mother
Animal Sentience: Varied. Many animals appear capable of speaking to other animals of different species (owls to foxes, foxes to porcupines, and so on) but not to humans. Whether this is because they choose not to reveal their ability to speak to humans (like the toys in Toy Story) or because humans are incapable of understanding them is unclear.
Animal Autonomy: Sadly degraded. Animals either live as the pets or servants of humans, or as best they can fend for themselves in the wild. The days of the great lion-fox-chicken civilizations are gone. Humans have also created an artificial rivalry between dogs and foxes, which did not exist in Robin Hood (although, oddly enough, Tod and Vixey look almost exactly like Robin and Marian, and are quite possibly their descendents). Foxes no longer wear clothes and go about on two legs; they crawl along the dirt on all fours.
Movie: Mary Poppins
Fox(es) Present: Only one; he has no name.
Animal Sentience: Terrifyingly intact. Oddly enough, there appear to be dual continuities with regard to animal self-awareness in the film — during the live-action portions, birds and other beasts act largely as they do in our own world, although one robin lands on Mary Poppins’ finger and cheerfully sings along with her. In the cartoon chalk-world sequences, however, things are entirely different. Penguins wear boater hats and work at ice cream parlors, but the fox is helpless and persecuted by cartoon hunters. He can speak and he can plead, but they show no mercy.
Animal Autonomy: None. The fox is entirely at the mercy of Bert’s largesse. The horses the children ride upon remain inert and dumb. The dogs are baying, mindless tools of their vicious masters — they pour toward him, an unthinking, unfeeling sea of fangs and haunches and slavering hunger. “Ah, ’tis them redcoats again!” he cries to himself. He has faced them before; he knows they carry his death in their jaws. When Bert and the children return to their old world, what will become of the nameless fox? His fate has only been postponed, not changed.
[All images via Disney Wiki]
Tags: animal sentience, disney movies, foxes, nagging questions
The Fox and the Hound: TEARS FOREVER
The worst day of my childhood was when I put the tape of “Fox and the Hound” in the vcr backwards, ruining it forever. I probably spent as many tears on that as I would have watching the movie over and over and crying every time.
A friend started singing “‘Cause we’re the best of friends” the other day and I nearly burst into heaving and sobbing.
OH GOD NO
She only sang two lines! And that’s all it took!!!!!
Many tears. AND HATRED OF THE STUPID EVIL CATERPILLAR.
One of my family’s earliest realizations of my oversized capacity for moral outrage (he killed the nice lady’s plant!) came from that STUPID CATERPILLAR.
THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT.
Another relevant entry in the study of animal sentience and autonomy in Disney films may be Bedknobs and Broomsticks although I don’t remember if there is a fox in it.
I JUST Googled it to see if there was, but I didn’t find any evidence for it.
disappointing.
Can we talk about Miss Price though? Pretty sure she was my first feminist idol.
OH MY GOD. Right? Taking a correspondence course on witchcraft! But it felt like such a betrayal at the end when she ends up with the deadbeat magician guy. For exactly that reason, obviously, but when I was 8 I was just like “whyyyyyyyyyy.”
There are times when The Toast is the best thing about my day (that’s every day) and then there are times when it makes me convulse with suppressed laughter by applying colonisation theory to my childhood.
“Humans have also created an artificial rivalry between dogs and foxes.” Just. Can’t. Breathe.
Always though there was something fishy about the fact that they seemed to get along just fine and the, boom, the hound is socialized by his human overlords to hate and kill the fox. This explains so much. Thank you.
Expand Title III ESL funding to foxes.
Another opportunity to declare Robin Hood the voice of sex. His voice may have triggered puberty for me.
Well YEAH. I mean, wait, I would never develop a crush on a cartoon character, right? [hides]
Fuck and yes. I cannot describe the feeling of relief when I realized there were other people out there who had the hots for fox Robin Hood.
I am among them! So dreamy.
I loved this article, but I’d like to point out that most of the animals in “Robin Hood” wear shirts but no pants, and I have always wondered why this is the case.
Boromir and Aragorn wore no pants in the Ralph Bakshi animated LotR, either, and they didn’t even have the excuse of being anthropomorphized animals. I SMELL A NO-PANTS CONSPIRACY.
How did I never notice this??? Those and the Hobbit movie from the same era are some of my favorite movies for some bizarre reason…
The strangest thing to me is characters like Donald Duck – he wears no pants normally, but does wear swim trunks and cover his lower half with a towel when he exits the bath. Does something happen in the pants area when he gets wet? I MUST KNOW
Yes! And if caught fresh out of the bath without a towel, he covers his nether feathers with his hand/wing/appendages and looks embarrassed. I’ve always wondered about this too.
Well, given that the Disney Robin Hood was the first movie I ever saw (age 4), I can’t say that his voice triggered puberty for me. But it IS damn’ sexy.
A hundred times yes. I was about to ask if anyone else found Robin Hood (foxhood AND manhood at its height?!?) uncomfortably attractive.
Joining the choir here. Must also admit a similar attraction to Maid Marian, for the same reasons. THOSE EYES.
I was on an overseas flight once that for some reason had The Fox and The Hound as one of the movie options. I’ve never in my life seen so many grown people struggling not to cry.
“We’ll always be friends forever, won’t we?”
“Yeah, forever.”
WAAAAHHHHHH
EMOTIONAL NAPALM
Same, but with “Marley and Me”
D:
We met, it seems, such a short time ago
You looked at me, needing me so
Yet from your sadness, our happiness grew
And I found out I needed you, too.
I remember how we used to play
I recall those rainy days
The fire’s glow that kept us warm
And now I find we’re both alone
Goodbye may seem forever, farewell is like the end
But in my heart’s a memory, and there you’ll always be
(Holy shit, I watched the YouTube video just for this song, and I am CRYING AT MY DESK.)
Yes but what does the fox say?
“Faith and begorrah!”, apparently.
a-ring-a-ding-a-ding, if I’m not mistaken.
Oodelally, of course!
Oh wow. Now, Disney Robin Hood was my favourite cartoon movie as a kid. Possibly it still is.
And yes, that Robin hood is a fox both literally and metaphorically.
I have a 4 1/2 year old and we have netflix which means we’ve seen “The Fox And The Hound” (arguably one of the least racist Disney films) a million times at least. The last time we watched it, there was The Big Dramatic Gun Shot and Niko started laughing. Horrified, I asked why he was laughing. “Well, there was a BIG NOISE and it startled the birds and they flew off and that’s REALLY FUNNY and pretty soon Tod’s gonna show up and find his home.” Phew.
It’s a sad story, but they put all the movies out of order. 1940 -> 1973 -> 1963 -> 1981 -> 1964. Different story if you order them by their chronological setting.
nooo my theory *theory crumbles into non-chronological dust*
Also, not totally related, but I never understood why on that show Franklin, the turtle was named Franklin, but all his friends were just called, like, Bear and Snail and Goose.
This!
Names like that drove me to distraction as a child!
Super Why is terrible with this–the three human children get human-children names, but the pig? Is named Pig.
Or in the Berenstain Bears, how all their friends had normal names like Lizzy or Fred but the kids were Brother Bear and Sister Bear, and addressed as such by their peers/teachers/other anthropomorphized bears.
See, that’s because the series developed from one children’s picture book into some sort of amalgamation of amateur story hour and pop-culture commentary (“The Berenstain Bears in No Guns Allowed”).
Still, the elements that belied that throughout the series development confused me as a kid… kind of like how society’s level of technology changed throughout the Boxcar Children series despite none of the characters ever aging because that book series was a zombie that was ghostwritten for dozens of years after the original author’s death, but I read them in chunks and never connected the dots.
Thank you for reminding me the hot lady fox was named Vixey. Disney subtlety FTW.
And “Tod” is a term for a fox. They weren’t really stretching with that movie.
But Todd is the dog’s name! WOAH.
No, the dog’s name is Copper, AND THAT IS NOT HOW YOU SPELL WHOA.
It’s like that person has never seen the movie or read this article.
I really hate when magical circumstances do not have internal structure- ie Pinocchio- foxes and crickets are anthropomorphic, whales and donkeys are animals.
The worst offender in the whole world is Stuart Little. I cannot take that mindfuck of a book. Stuart is a humanoid mouse born to a regular woman, who falls in love WITH A BIRD, and later on also another tiny human girl, who is apparently being courted by all the boys in the town? The household cat is trying to kill him and apparently NO ONE in his doting family who accept him as an equal humanoid can be bothered to care? He has a magic car that turns invisible. He gets on buses and pays with a fake mouse sized dime his mom made him, which makes NO SENSE- either he has to pay like regular people who do not pay proportional to their height, or he doesn’t need to. He decides to seek his fortune so he takes off in his little car and becomes a substitute teacher, despite the fact that the book never even covers if he got an education, and he decides that no subject matter matters so they move on to talking about who would be king of the world. Oh my god I hate that book so much.
Oh one more. Redwall. Throughout the series it’s completely unclear if they’re animals living in human scaled buildings, or if they’re living in animal sized buildings. And there’s a first, never repeated scene with the rats all riding on a wagon pulled by a terrified horse that implies that the rats left a human scale building, but then they never return to that. The horse is not ever implied to be sentient.
This has been bothering me for about 20 years!
I also used to have a crush on Martin the Warrior, NOT GONNA LIE. Also that book makes me bawl.
Hi thank you for inspiring my next Redwall post
I look forward to it with intense pleasure. Brian Jacques addressed these issues by saying, “Look I don’t want to talk about it”.
Thank you for writing your redwall post! My gentleman person was thrilled- he was a huge childhood fan and one of his favorite memories is going to see Brian Jacques at a book signing and Mr. Jacques apparently did a theatrical recital of “CLUNY WAS COMING” from memory that brought down the house of sububurban midwestern kids who longed to be mice with secret fighting strengths.
I also used to have a crush on Martin the Warrior, NOT GONNA LIE. Also that book makes me bawl.
I feel like Mallory would do great things with a “Best Disney Villain Songs” article. Please, sing to me of “the importance of body language” and Scar’s sardonic interactions with Whoopi and oh lord, the things you could do with Hellfire.
I beg of you <3
Are we really watching the collapse of fox civilisation, or are we in fact watching the rise of fox civilisation? The timeline is unclear.