On the surface, Disney's RASCAL may appear to be yet another entry in the long list of Disney's "boy and his dog" movies - only this time the dog is a bandit-masked, human-handed, cute lil' raccoon. But in fact, Disney's RASCAL is actually about another one of our favourite recurring Disney themes - children who have not properly grieved the loss of a parent. In this one, all the animal hijinks, of which there are plenty, play second fiddle to the infuriatingly negligent actions of a rambling-man father, the dogged perseverance and self-sacrifice of an older sister, and the tacit understanding of a town that it might just take the whole village to properly look out for this boy and his racoon.
