The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales… (2017)
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The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales… Movie Review
The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales… is a 2017 French animated anthology comedy film directed by Benjamin Renner. It is the very best animated film of the year.
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“But we are foxes, we eat the chicks“
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This film is an anthology which is rare these days for animation and it was done so well thus I ate it up. The film is presented to us the audience as the farmyard animals give us an introduction and introduce the stories to us in a theatre. That is a very interesting approach which is not at all original, but I haven’t seen it in animation since the early days of Looney Tunes in the thirties. I absolutely loved it as it was quirky and the best possible way to connect the stories which are still not too connected but at least are not disparate.
The film has three stories and they are basically of the same length, running at around 25 minutes. I loved that as each thus got solid focus and care. The first story is A Baby to Deliver and it’s absolutely phenomenal. A lazy stork doesn’t want to deliver the baby, so it is up to three farmyard friends to the job for him. The adventures they have are very entertaining and amusing and this is the most frenetic segment of the film, but also a wonderfully executed madcap, action comedy.
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The Big Bad Fox is the second and in my opinion the best story of the three. It is the best because it is not only funny (and it is frequently hilarious) but also very touching and certainly the deepest, most powerful part of the film. So the wolf makes the fox kidnap the eggs from the mother hen, they quickly hatch and he has to scare them until it’s time to eat them. The younglings, however, star to care for him and think he is their mother and the fox also develops the same feelings. Eventually the fox and the hen became parents together which was wonderful to witness and such a fantastic message about diverse parenting.
The third segment is called A Perfect Christmas and it is easily the weakest of the bunch. Do not get me wrong, I liked this story and it is very sweet and charming, but it was much less entertaining or funny than the previous two and it was just your regular, old-fashioned Christmas special. I did like the dynamic between the characters though.
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Speaking of which, they are excellent, so well developed in such a short time. Rabbit and Duck are such a funny couple of stupid idiots and I just loved their interactions with the Pig who acts like their voice of reason. Pig is one of the highlights as watching his frustrations with everyone was quite funny. Wolf is the only one who is archetypal in his behavior and sort of like a villain for the film, Fox is naturally a wonderful soul and highly endearing whereas Hen is pretty badass for a hen mother and Dog is also very well realized and the dynamic between those two is great. The interactions between everyone are superb, they are wonderful as a group and the voice acting is top-notch.
The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales… features terrific animation. It is the kind of French simplistic hand-drawn animation that may not be for everyone, but I adored it. The character designs are simple, but cute and the backgrounds seem to come out of a comic-strip – highly detailed, endearing and colorful.
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The humor is quite strong and I laughed more than a couple of times. The dialogue is fantastic, brisk and very French while the film is very well paced as well. The score is also superb as is the direction from Benjamin Renner and Patrick Imbert, the dudes behind lovely ‘Ernest & Celestine’. This isn’t quite as sophisticated or overall strong as that film (it does showcase anxieties from societal roles and norms very well though), but it came close enough and is easily the best animated film of the year which was shamefully snubbed for an Oscar.
The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales… is a wonderfully French anthology which consists of three stories: the first one is a very fast, highly entertaining and funny gag comedy, the second one is the deepest and most endearing story and the third is cute and sweet, but inferior to the previous two. The characters are very endearing and their interactions are quite amusing, its hand-drawn animation is lovely in its simplicity, the score is fantastic and the film is consistently entertaining, charming and also quite funny. It is easily the best animated film of this lackluster year.
