Le roman de Renard

I saw this last night as part of the Exeter animation festival. It was preceded by two great shorts, but nothing prepared me for the Tale of the Fox. You might expect stop-motion animation from 1930 to be stilted, with locked-off camera set-ups and slow, jerky animals with ruffling fur (see King Kong, for instance). Starewitch's (this, according to his grand-daughter's website, is the correct way to spell his name) characters are incredibly expressive, fast moving and dynamic, and he includes crash zooms, whip pans and close-ups to stunning effect. If you've studied animation before, you'll be blown away by the use of motion blur, and the compositing of animated creatures with seemingly flowing water, but for non-nerds there is a fast, very funny story to be enjoyed. The Tale of the Fox might just be the single greatest achievement in animation there has ever been. That includes Willis O'Brien, Ray Harryhausen, Walt Disney and perhaps even Hayao Miyazaki.

"The Tale of the Fox," finally released in April 1937, was posed to be distributed to theaters years earlier as cinema's first animated feature film with accompanying audio. But its creator, Ladislas Starevich, had trouble securing a clean sound track. As one of cinema's top stop-motion pioneers, Starevich was intending to finish his masterpiece in 1930 when he ran out of money after he spent his savings on a distorted audio track. Several years later, the German National Socialist government (the Nazis) took notice of Starevich's film as it collected dust sitting on his shelves and agreed to fund its completion with audio.

"The Tale of the Fox" was based on Johann Wolfgang Gothe's interpretation of the Middle Ages' 'Reynard the Fox,' about a trickster red fox who constantly frustrates the other animals in the kingdom by his wile ways and intellect. The Nazis, sensing a great opportunity to show off its Teutonic pride with a work from Gothe, one of Germany's most illustrious writers, stepped in to pay for the audio, complete with a musical score and voice actors speaking the animals' dialogue. Once the track was laid alongside Starevich's visuals, the movie premiered in Germany.

"The animation is truly visionary and charming," writes reviewer Martin Teller, "with beautiful attention to detail and impressionist touches. These puppets are alive with character, and you can draw a straight line from this film to the magic of Wes Anderson's 'Mr. Fantastic Fox (2006).'"

Starevich and his team took 18-months, beginning in 1929, to create the story of Renard, the fox who loved to play pranks on his fellow animals. In an early trick, a neighboring wolf saw the fox standing next to a pile of fish and inquired how he caught so many. The fox pointed to the frozen hole in the ice where he stuck his tail in and caught fish by the dozens. The eager wolf broke up the ice and dropped in his tail, only to see the hole ice up within minutes. He became stuck and was unable to get out of the dilemma he found himself in. For its intended 1930 premier, Starevich's producer Louis Nalpas decided to use the new audio technology of the late 1920s, Vitaphones' sound-on-disc. But everyone involved was frustrated by its quality. Later the French provided their own sound track in 1941.

Because of its delay, "The Tale of the Fox" became the third animated feature film to have sound. Argentina's 1931 'Peludopolis' (now lost) by Quirino Cristani, and Soviet Union's 1935 "The New Gulliver" predated Starevich's only feature film. Starevich, who made his first short animated film in 1910 in Russia, had been living in France since the 1917 October Revolution. His stop-motion expertise in the 1930 film was so ahead of its time that despite the advances of the technology in 1933's "King Kong," Some critics claim "The Tale of the Fox" is still is more impressive for its time.

"The film is performed exclusively by puppets of animals moved by means of stunning, technically brilliant stop motion animation," wrote film reviewer Keith Allen, "and the effect the director achieves by populating his work solely with such puppets is truly bewitching."

Even in black and white, and years after it's been supplanted, stop-motion animation still impresses with the lush detail it's able to convey. The best movies rendered with graphics programs on a computer can tug at our heartstrings, but there's vivid, tangible life and texture in the meticulous frame by frame movement of figures and set pieces that is at least as awe-inspiring. It requires terrific imagination to produce any such feature, let alone a fable that anthropomorphizes animals and embraces pure fantastical whimsy. And that's just what we get in 'The story of the fox,' complete with a medieval setting and sometimes jarringly dark overtones. For various reasons this may not be for everyone, but one way or another there's no mistaking that this is a vibrant, dazzling viewing experience.

Inspired by classic folklore of the vulpine as a trickster figure, this treatment especially highlights the wily, sometimes cruel cunning. As it does, the picture bursts with wit, intelligence, and heart to build each scene and the overall story - figuratively and literally, as there are many small elements to painstakingly adjust from one shot to the next. All my congratulations to directors Ladislas and Irene Starevich, editor Laura Sejourné, and all others involved in the fundamental crafting of the picture: 'The story of the fox' is unquestionably a labor of love, and the hard effort shines through with rich, fanciful storytelling and film-making that stands tall and stands out even 85 years later.

Barely over 1 hour, the picture still arguably is a tad overlong, perhaps particularly at the climax. Nevertheless, the writing is excellent and whole, weaving in timeless archetypes, themes, and otherwise notions. Every square centimeter of the tableau laid before us, down to the slightest facet of a character's appearance, is considered and executed with utmost care. It's one matter to watch a Pixar film and recognize the 0s and 1s on the other side of the screen; it's another to see stop-motion animation and know there's not one scrap of the presentation that wasn't handmade, probably from scratch, and moved by hand. I feel like I'm repeating myself in saying so, yet that's just the point: most any film can tell an engaging story, as is true here as well, but the way in which the tale is told can make all the difference. This movie is simply a delight in every capacity.

For non-French speakers who don't care for subtitles, or for those whose personal preferences lie outside old titles or black and white imagery, some viewers may be better served seeking their entertainment elsewhere. Even for devoted cinephiles, I won't say that 'The story of the fox' is perfectly, absolutely enthralling. Yet it represents such a tremendous endeavor, and is so enjoyable on its own merits, that it's hard not to offer a blanket recommendation. It's not so essential that you need to go out of your way for it, but if you get the chance to watch this 1937 picture, it's well worth 62 minutes of your time.

Seven years before "Snow White" Wladyslaw Starewicz produced a truly amazing piece of stop motion animation, not only one of the first to use sound and dialogue as more than decoration, but the first truly adult animation with a blackly comic story-line that's astonishingly fresh today.

The culmination of twenty years of pioneering animation, "Tale" was virtually forgotten from it's release till the early 1990's when it resurfaced at various film festivals. Seeing "Tale" now it's easy to understand why 1930's audiences might have had a hard time with this. The brutality of humour and characters would've been off-putting to most and even now the film an ability to shock.

It's easy to go into this expecting a more primitive "Song of the South" and at first this seems like where we're headed. But there's a cynicism and sophistication Walt could never have imagined.

Reynaud (craftily voiced by Romain Bouquet)is no Disney hero nor should he be taken as a soft hearted villain. Completely amoral, loyal to none (outside his family) he ruthlessly exploits the gullibility of his peers (and even the king himself), in a series of inventive and savagely comic encounters to a point where the enraged animal kingdom declares war on him.

Ten years in the making, "Tale" offers numerous highlights (the drunken rabbit in the monastery, the attack on Reynaud's castle; not to mention a particularly surreal and endearing song between a love smitten cat and a royal girl dove during the strange armistice in which no animal is allowed to eat another.)

An unforgettable and remarkable movie that defies it's age. Try to look out for this one on video (it's available) or in animation festivals... Better still write into your local TV station and request it so more people can see it.

I love this little gem of a film. It does deserve a place along side Snow White and the New Gulliver. I saw this quite by accident on Youtube and I am glad I did. I don't want to tell you anything about the story. Instead, read the great story it is based on. I read it in French. It is a refreshingly medieval take on morality, refreshing compared to the tales of Perraut or La Fontaine. Some here say the film can't be shown in the US because of some law or other forbidden the exhibiting of Nazi financed films. That could be, though I would find that very hard to believe as I saw both Triumph of the Will (at a theater in San Francisco) and Olympiad (on television-AMC I believe, though maybe not) in the USA. How more Nazi can you get than those two films and yet they are both distributed in the USA. So, to me, there should be no reason that this true, and joyful, classic should not be seen in the US. If not, see if you can see it on Youtube. It comes in six parts with English subtitles. There it is called 'Tale of the Fox.' Hope you can see it and laugh along.