The website AllMovie wants us to think that this—not really a movie, just an episode of Walt Disney Presents—is similar to Ben-Hur and various Star Wars movies and the live action Alice in Wonderland. This is a lie. In fact what it feels more similar to is the “Franklin, the Friendly Woodchuck” segment from an old episode of Animaniacs. Not the same, really, but that same sort of jovially voiced narrative wherein animals are doing animal things. Disney made a fair few of those over the years, mostly appearing on TV. This one apparently filled out a theatrical slot along with Jungle Cat, which was probably also an episode of The Wonderful World of Disney.

Mala is a raccoon with cubs. They live in a tree in the South somewhere. Lulubelle is a coonhound with puppies. She lives on the farm of Jeff Emery (Oscar Busch) in the South somewhere. One day, Nubbin, the youngest pup, gets trapped in a butter churn while exploring. Jeff goes to return it for the person for whom he’s fixing it, but it falls off the truck and gets smashed. Nubbin survives and ends up finding Mala, all of whose cubs but one have died in a storm. Despite the natural antipathy between raccoon and coonhound, she takes him in and nurses him. He is essentially the adopted brother of Weecha, the last cub. There are shenanigans and goings-on, until Jeff finds Nubbin again and returns him to make him a proper coonhound.

It seems petty to suggest that, even if a raccoon were somehow inclined to take in a puppy, she wouldn’t be able to nurse one. Maybe—maybe—if we were talking a lapdog of some sort, but coonhounds are big dogs. I just don’t think she would be physically capable of it. Even with all of her other cubs dead, she just shouldn’t have enough milk, enough capacity to find food for a weaned puppy—and this puppy is explicitly not weaned. And that’s even without getting into whether a dog is physically capable of suckling from a raccoon.

I really feel as though this is the sort of thing people think of, when they think of live action Disney. We’ve covered a lot of it now, some better and some worse, and this may be the first time we’ve gotten to something that is predominantly “folksy narrator (Rex Allen) talking over animals doing animal things.” Not a True-Life Adventure, goodness knows. The fictional ones, the more whimsical ones. I’m not going to claim they didn’t exist. But honestly, they were more likely to be TV shows. You have to fill out that hour of programming somehow.

If this movie is actually similar to any movie I’ve seen, it’s The Fox and the Hound. That one anthropomorphizes the characters considerably more, of course; no folksy narrator but the voices of Kurt Russell and so forth. It also, frankly, makes more of it make sense—even if they’d been nursed by the same mother, they’re both canids at least, right? And they weren’t; the fox was bottle-raised by a human. But it does have the sort of thing where it speculates how much of animal behaviour is upbringing and how much is instinct. Interestingly, they appear to come to opposite conclusions in some ways.

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