The Tale of the Fox (1937)
Some films impress you. A few make you sit up and wonder how on earth they were made at all. The Tale of the Fox is firmly the latter.
This is a stop-motion feature very nearly ninety years old, the painstaking puppet work of Władysław Starewicz and his daughter Irène, and the first thing that strikes you is just how astonishingly fluid and assured it is. Based on the medieval Reynard the Fox fables, it follows a wily fox forever outwitting the other animals of the kingdom, and it moves with a grace and a confidence you would scarcely credit from the 1930s. I went in braced for something creaky and historical, something you watch with respectful patience as a duty to the form. What I got was something genuinely alive.
The craft on display is remarkable by any standard, let alone one this old. The puppets are expressive, the movement is smooth where you brace yourself for jerky, and the whole thing arrives complete with voice acting and a proper score, which for the era is no small achievement. Starewicz was a true pioneer of the form, and you can feel a master at work in every frame. There is an artistry and a patience here that a good deal of modern animation, for all its computing power, would struggle to match. It is not a film made despite its limitations. It is a film that seems barely aware it has any.
It is not flawless, mind you. The story is a touch abstract and episodic, structured less like a narrative with momentum and more like a series of cunning set pieces strung loosely together. And there is, it has to be said, a faintly creepy quality to these scurrying little animal puppets that now and then tips from charming into genuinely unsettling. Whether that is a flaw or a feature probably depends on your tolerance for the uncanny. I found myself in two minds about it more than once.
But that is a small quibble against what the film represents. This is, in a real sense, the blueprint: the deep root of a whole tradition of stop-motion I have come to love, the line that runs all the way down to Aardman's Wallace and Gromit and the European puppet-animators I have been steadily working my way through. Watching it, you are watching where all of that began. There is something genuinely moving about that, if you let yourself feel it. The same instinct that drove Starewicz to spend untold hours articulating tiny limbs frame by frame is the same instinct that powers every great animator working today. You can trace a direct line.
It is worth saying, too, that the film sits in interesting company when you think about what European cinema was doing in this period. I loved A Day in the Country for the way it captured something timeless within an apparently simple story, and there is a similar quality here: the fable structure keeps things light on the surface while something richer hums underneath.
So while The Tale of the Fox is a little strange and a little slight, it is also a small marvel, and viewing it as a piece of living history only deepens the pleasure. For anyone with a soft spot for stop-motion, or simply a curiosity about how the form was born, it is close to essential.
Three and a half stars. A remarkable, slightly eerie little piece of animation history that has more than earned its place at the head of the family tree.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1937 | Watched: 2026-08-21
Where to watch
Watch in the US
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