The Story of the Fox

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.

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.

Alternate title: The Frenchtastic Mr. Fox.

It's honestly crazy how this looks, and how well it's aged. It's hard to even describe the animation style, but what I can say is that nothing else looks quite like this. For the visuals alone, it's worth checking out for anyone who's interested in animation.

Thankfully, the rest of the film's also pretty good. The story is simple but interesting enough, and I liked the film's odd sense of humour, too.

This is an underrated decades-old animated movie that I never would have known about were it not for Letterboxd. Gotta love how easy it is to find such weird and cool movies online nowadays - I continue to make sure I don't take it for granted.

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.

It is not officially available in the US, but you can sometimes get copies of the adapted European release through ebay and other online sources. Certainly, it deserves a full class presentation. This is one of those films you'll most likely re-watch several times, if you're a fan of stop-motion animation.

The German version was released in April 1937, thereby qualifying "Tale Of The Fox" as one of the Pre-"Snow White" Six of cartoon features. As far as puppetoon "epics" go, I guess it runs a tie with Alexsandr Ptushko's "New Gulliver" as first, since the bulk of the production was completed before 1931 (though there was certainly more tinkering done in the mid-thirties). However, apart from the impressionistic black and white photography, there's little that "dates" this classic. Starewicz's technique is so flawless and the facial expressions of his humanized furry stars so expressive, that it is hard to imagine anyone today mastering this type of animation without some digital help. As wonderful as "King Kong" is, it still looks more primitive in comparison.

... And speaking of "Kong", the forest set-ups in this one share some of the dreamlike quality of Skull Island, with plenty of soft-focus foliage. Basically, this is a swashbuckler with an all-critter cast, complete with King Lion and Lioness (passing affections to a singing cat), foolish bunnies, easy-to-be-had wolf and bear, dancing mice, workaholic badger and, of course, the wily star who gets the best of everybody. Most spectacular are the battle scenes waged against the fox's castle, but the gentle scoffing of authorities and "organized" religion (rabbits getting drunk in church, the fox's views of Heaven at the bottom of a well, etc.) makes this more avant-garde than the animated films we're used to.

Interestingly, Disney started making an adaptation of this story three decades later, but instead made a fox-version of Robin Hood. Usually, cartoon features don't star an anti-hero like Renart, who lies and cheats his way through life and wins out in the end. Although it boasts a Disneyesque level of production excellence, "Tale Of The Fox" is about as un-Disney like as you can get in thirties animation.