El cuento del zorro

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.