by Tim Brayton
If you've been following the Best Animated Feature Oscar for the past few years, perhaps you remember the 2013 nominee Ernest & Celestine, a gentle and generous children's movie from France, about the adventures of a bear and a mouse becoming best friends while on the run from the law. This year, two of that film's producers and one of its directors are back in the hunt with The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales, an anthology of stories about the inhabitants of a rural farmyard in France.
The film took a roundabout path to theaters. Based on comic books by Benjamin Renner – the Ernest & Celestine director, back to help usher his material to the screen, with co-director Patrick Imbert and co-writer Jean Regnaud – the three stories were initially intended to be episodes in a TV series. Somewhere along the way, they got promoted to feature film status, with the help of a framework narrative presenting the stories as plays put on by an enthusiastic, barely-competent theater troupe of farm animals.
The television roots of the material remain visible in the finished project. The animation has the distinctive look of 2D computer animation produced in a Flash-style environment: all of the moment is perfectly smooth and perfectly flat, like the world's most graceful paper cut-outs. Thanks to the very fun character designs in this movie, the limitations of this form of animation are substantially mitigated: the thick lines, like something scrawled roughly in a grade-school notebook, and pastel color scheme of the whole film both strongly suggest that we're watching the walking, talking illustrations of a picture book. In that light that the flatness and weightlessness of the animation ends up contributing to the film's effect, rather than distracting from it.
And quite a lovely effect it is. This isn't anywhere close to the sweetness and soulfulness of Ernest & Celestine, and it hardly seems likely that was anybody's intent.
What the film does take from that predecessor, though, is the winsome frivolity of childhood: this is a busy, silly movie, suffused with the energetic nonsense of kids playing and making it all up as they go along. That is, in fact, very much at the heart of two-thirds of the narratives in the film, which a miserably sensible pig (Damien Witecka) has to deal with the unpredictable impulses of a dimwitted, joyful rabbit (Kamel Abdessadok) and duck (Antoine Schoumsky). These are nothing so much as the story of a harried grown-up attempting to deal with these kids who just keep running around, having fun without a trace of self-awareness or social order.
And that is, when it comes down it, not so very far away from the middle story, the one that gives the film its title. The not-at-all big and only minimally bad fox (Guillaume Darnault) has kidnapped eggs, with the intention of eating the chickens inside once they've grown up a bit; but when he comes face-to-face with the newborn chicks (Magali Rosenzweig and Elise Noiraud), their excitement at meeting "Mommy" flusters and confuses him. It eventually lands at the exact place you'd expect – the predator becomes a protector in the face of a bigger threat, moved by the power of Parental Love – but before that happens, there's a lot more of the Elmer Fudd/Bugs Bunny dynamic than there is sticky family sentiment. If, of course, Bugs were a guileless trio of adorable little baby birds, and not a wiseguy trickster.
A distinct vibe of Loony Tunes comic anarchy runs through all three of the segments, for that matter. Though the segments all come in around 23 minutes, the pacing and rhythms strongly evoke the gag-a-minute impulse of mid-20th Century comic cartoons, where every new scene brings along a ridiculous, improbable crisis to solve through the skillful application of unreal physics and pratfalls. Mixed with the cozy, soft visuals, it results in a delightful, feisty blend of anarchy and charm.
This is, by any measure, a kids' film. Even with some jokes cutting at a level above the target audience, there's very little that's unduly sophisticated or intelligent. But kids' films can be good or bad just like anything else, and the high-spirited nonsense of The Big Bad Fox makes for one of the year's very best kids' film of any nation. At the moment, the film has only had a U.S. qualifying release for awards consideration, but GKIDS – that invaluable friend to lovers of animation of every sort – is planning on giving it a commercial release in North America starting in February, 2018. It's anybody's guess whether it will have a brand new Oscar nomination to send it on its way, but regardless, it's worth keeping this one on your radar.
Reviews of Eligible Animated Contenders:
In this Corner of the World (Japan) reviewed by Tim Brayton
Coco (US) reviewed by Jorge Molina
The Girl Without Hands (France) reviewed by Tim Brayton
The Breadwinner (Ireland/Canada/Luxembourg) reviewed by Nathaniel
The Emoji Movie (US) reviewed by Sean Donovan
The Boss Baby (US) reviewed by Nathaniel R
Loving Vincent (UK/Poland) reviewed by Tim Brayton
Bird Boy: The Forgotten Children (Spain) reviewed by Tim Brayton