A dance routine on the thin blue line

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FAMILIAR BARNYARD FABLES get ceaselessly delightful twists in this puff of animated French pastry from some of the team that gave us Ernest & Celestine.

Although they carry their fine lines and soft watercolour washes over from that quietly subversive modern classic, Benjamin Renner and Patrick Imbert stick to kidsville here, with three linked stories safe for wee ones yet equally pleasing to grownups. Recalling Warner Bros. cartoons at their postwar height and early Disney stuff at its most anarchic, this well-paced effort follows the Bugs-and-daffy concept of having principal characters introduce their own antics, as if the creatures were playing themselves in an old-fashioned music hall (sans straw hats). There’s also a witty, folk-based score from composer Robert Marcel Lepage—a Montrealer apparently not to be confused with Montreal’s other Robert Lepage.

The film’s furry protagonists are simply called Rabbit, Duck, and the like, with one grouchy porcine fellow (voiced by Damien Witecka) tormented by the shenanigans of his considerably dumber mates, who generally travel from harm to stable.

In the first tale, they saddle him with the burden of uniting an adorable lost baby with her putative parents, since the local stork (Christophe Lemoin) is too lazy to finish the job. In the third, probably best viewed a few months from now, the critters carelessly destroy a fake Santa Claus and then rein in a real one. And the central saga finds a Road Runner–ish Fox (Guillaume Darnault) forever thwarted in attempts to emulate the much bigger, badder Wolf (Boris Rehlinger). When Fox ends up with three eggs stolen from the badass Hen (Céline Ronté), they hatch and call him Maman—setting off serious identity crises for all involved.

With American Studio Ghibli distributor GKIDS handling such fun Tales, it’s not surprising that there’s an English-language version in the pipeline. But the Gallic shrug in these voices only adds plus de charme.

Ken Eisner