Le roman de Renard

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.

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.

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.

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.