The Story of the Fox

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.

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.

It took ten years to make it.I must confess I was not expecting much when I began to watch it.What?A puppet animated feature film from the thirties?For the kiddies??

"Le Roman de Renart" (it was originally a "t " ,for Renart was a proper noun;the old FRench word for fox was "goupil" ) is 65 minutes of constant innovation.Borrowing from La Fontaine his "Corbeau et le Renard " (the Raven and the Fox)and smartly integrating anachronisms (the dream of Renard :the tournament is given a live commentary treatment complete with microphone,the sentence which the Lion King (!)says when he's attacking Renart's fortress is from Napoleon in front of the pyramids.),Ladislas Larevich does not forget humor (the message the Lion King finds in his cassette)and by several respects it's also a musical: there is a frog chorus fifty years before Rupert the Bear (and Paul Mac Cartney),Italian serenades ..

It's very faithful to the spirit of the book:by no means a film for children (it would be interesting to watch a movie of that time targeted at the children market,if there were any),it's a work for the grown-ups like Grimault/Prévert's "Le Roi et L'Oiseau" or Dunning's "Yellow Submarine" .Yes,it's that much good.My favourite scene is when Renard has fallen to the bottom of the well and he pretends he is in Heaven: the pictures almost predate pop art and psychedelic state !The spoof on religion is always present ,the "love one another" becomes " don't eat one another" ,and the Lion King asks his subjects to go veggie (except for his royal majesty on Thursday and on Sunday);another stupefying scene shows the rabbit who begins to shake his small bells frenetically after having drunk the sacred wine (the blood of the Lord)in the church.

In France,it's completely forgotten.It's a buried treasure.

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.