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.

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.

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 watched this 1937 French stop-motion animated film last night on YouTube, and I thought it was a great film.

This film is also the second stop-motion animated film in animation history. The film is based on the old medieval stories of Reynard the Fox and all the tricks he plays with the animals in King Lion's court, who are trying to bring him to justice and whose punishment is being hung. You know, I could clearly see the inspiration for Disney's animated version of "Robin Hood," as well as the inspiration for the 2009 stop-motion animated film "Fantastic Mr. Fox."

Overall, I really enjoyed this film, and it is now one of my favorite foreign animated films.

"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."