...Walt Disney's Robin Hood was released in US theaters. Directed by Wolfgang "Woolie" Reitherman and with character design and animation headed up by Milt Kahl, the film wasn't hailed as anything remarkable at the time, but it marked a turning point not just for the studio—it was the first animated film they made without any involvement from their late founder—but for western animation in general. Up until then, "funny animal cartoons" were synonymous with the sorts of rubbery, exaggerated character designs seen in things like Looney Tunes shorts or low-budget TV cartoons or older Disney films like Song of the South. Even Robin Hood's own concept art, courtesy of Ken Anderson, was leaning in this direction. But Kahl instead insisted on giving it the full Feature Animation treatment, taking the efforts they had been making since Bambi to render animals accurately and adapting them for the first time to their bipedal critters. To quote blogger Foxx Nolte:

"...Milt fought to push Robin in an older, more handsome direction - with a thicker neck, less pointed nose, and more mature body language. Milt also went to great lengths to retain the sense of an anatomy of a real fox, which he was relatively alone in the production for insisting on...

"Equally brilliant although less frequently seen onscreen is Kahl's Maid Marian. A worthy companion of Kahl's other great leading lady - Lady of Lady and the Tramp - Marian manages to be vivacious and romantic despite remaining 80% covered in a ludicrous outfit the entire run time (if you think it's easy to draw over-dressed characters, try it sometime). ... Despite being a floating face and hands inside a dress, Marian has the screen presence of a star. Robin's festive reds and greens contrast and compliment Marian's oranges, pinks and purples. The two have real screen chemistry and are the two most accomplished and interesting character designs to hail from the animation unit in the 70s."

Equally interesting is how little any of it affected the storytelling. While the angle of being cast with humanimals was repeatedly mined for sight gags—turtles ducking inside their shells, a snake being stuffed into an ale barrel through the hole, a fox disguising himself as a stork using stilts—the overall story is still just an adaptation of the Robin Hood legend that, in its broad strokes, could have been just as easily told with human actors on a soundstage. This, too, had never been attempted in a high-budget production. If you wanted to tell a story with animals, conventional wisdom went, you had to have a reason. To an extent this is still true: look at the way Zootopia is ABOUT its premise of a world of intelligent animals at least as much as it's about its characters; it's treated as a high-concept hook the same way about half of Pixar's films treat their otherworldly settings. In Robin Hood, it's just the esthetic the artists decided to roll with.

And so it is perhaps no surprise that the film is considered a pivotal moment in the birth of the modern furry fandom. To quote Nolte again:

"It's the first time that humanistic animal characters were used in a dramatic situation without undermining its effect. Now, yes, I know, I've already characterized this film as low stakes and companionable, but at the very least we can say that we are concerned that Robin may not survive his leap into the moat in a way that we are not when, say, Goofy falls off a building. The animals of Robin Hood are both identifiably human and identifiably mortal. And they did set precedents... At that time Disney was still pretty much the only game in town and Robin Hood the only real example of a certain type of funny animal."

She goes on to discuss how the fandom itself partially grew out of a group of people who had moved to California and Florida to get jobs as Disney theme park mascots, and at this point I'm out of my depth so I'll just drop the link again and let you read it for yourself if you're interested.

So in closing, happy 50th birthday to the furry community, I guess.