Movie Thoughts: Stone Fox (1987)

• Released: 30 March 1987
• Directed by: Harvey Hart
• Running time: 1 h 40 min
• Rating 2/5

Synopsis

After his only family member falls ill, twelve-year-old Willy must take care of his grandfather's cattle ranch all by himself. With the ranch almost going out of business, he decides to enter a dog sled race to hopefully acquire the prize money.

My Thoughts

I like sled dog movies. Well, some of them, anyways. But it's genuinely a genre I hold dear, partially due to my childhood of watching many of these movies. But (re)visiting them is always leading to mixed results. Some I find liking better, some worse. Stone Fox is unfortunately one of the more negative ones.

So this isn't, like, a horrible movie or anything. The acting was decent, cinematography okay for a TV movie, and I actually liked the characters (some movies I've seen involving working dogs have real assholes for main characters, see Toby McTeague or Kayla: A Cry in the Wilderness). Willy is not a bad main character. He's a bit simple, but he's very dedicated and humble and you just feel so much pity for this boy who may not only lose his only family member left but also the farm he grew up on that has been in his family for generations.

But there's negative aspects to the movie, too. There is only one Native American character, the titular Stone Fox. At first I thought maybe it would be cool if he were to end up becoming some mentor figure to Willy, but instead he's consistently portrayed as a villain by the townspeople because he's stoic and didn't forgive the colonizers for what they did to his people. Which is yikes, considering Willy is the grandson of a colonizer. It's literally brought up that his grandfather was the one who established his ranch on native land. It's just... not a very good look when your only character of color is consistently portrayed as negative like this. I get that, in the end, they end up humanizing Stone Fox as he shows pity for Willy and gives him a new dog, but for 90% of the movie he's just seen as nothing more than a negative obstacle for Willy to overcome.

Then there's of course the fact that Willy literally works his dog to death just so he can win his race and get the prize money. I get that you want to save your farm, dude, but is it really worth working your most beloved dog and only family member sans your grandfather to death? He has only one dog to pull his sled (Morgan), couldn't he have borrowed someone else's dog to make the team larger and thus not have to overexert Morgan? He has plenty of school friends and many of the people in town seem to have a dog, so why not simply ask them? Now your most beloved pet is dead. Yes, he does end up instantly getting a Samoyed puppy from Stone Fox after he comes home from winning the race, but I really wouldn't call it a happy ending if my favorite pet died and then I'd not even be allowed to grieve before being given a new puppy. 

It also doesn't really resolve that much after he gets the puppy. We show that grandpa is getting better, but if he'll fully recover remains up to interpretation. Will he ever be able to run his farm again? Willy can't possibly keep it up on his own. He also doesn't have his cattle dog anymore, so he'll have to spend a lot of time training the puppy, too. Will the farm ever get back on track? Never shown. He just gets the puppy and the credits start. Come on, movie, give us some resolution to all this conflict.

The wolves, for however briefly they appear in this movie, are apparently a mix between stock footage of real wolves and huskies they used. Not a fan of this choice as there's regular huskies in the sled dog race which makes it look like there's wolves in a race. Ah, well.

So, yeah, a decent movie but with some yikes moments that ultimately pull it down. I just wasn't that big a fan.