Hello Sunshine

fiddle leaf fig for you specifically

Cops can murder unarmed Black people and many white folks still jump to defend the police force.

As someone who grew up on The Fox and the Hound, I can’t begin to tell you how much this burned me at the time and how much it burns me now. You know why The Fox and the Hound worked so well? 

Because it was absolutely, horrendously, maddeningly unfair.

Nothing that happens in the Fox and the Hound, even if it ends up alright, is portrayed as just or right or okay. Tod and Copper’s friendship as children and adult Tod’s belief that they can go right on the way they’ve been is criticized by other characters, but not by the narrative itself – Copper’s certainly not the hero or the voice of reason and Big Mama’s just worried Tod’s going to get himself shot in the face. 

The directions their lives take, most of the major choices they make, are made for them by someone else, and not out of some director’s twisted belief that accepting the world’s ugliness and hoping it gets better equals maturity. On the contrary, Copper and Slade spend the movie behaving like petulant toddlers and it’s Tod the optimist who comes through in the end. Copper and Slade choosing compassion is the first truly adult thing we see them do.

The movie ends on a bittersweet note because by that point, the damage has been done. No, “remembering each other in their hearts” doesn’t make it okay, not really, nor does the fact that Tod’s got a mate in the wild. Even their last shot is shadowed, distant, and tinged with melancholy.

Tod will never return to his old friendship with Copper, and whether he would have chosen to eventually drift into the wild or nap in front of the Widow Tweed’s fire forever, he’ll always have the memory of her abandoning him in the rain.

The great tragedy of The Fox and the Hound is that it’s built on not just one, but a long series of moments that in a kinder world would never have happened.