‘The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales...’
In the mix among the megabudget 3-D spectaculars is a hand-drawn little gem that feels as if it’s peeking around a tree from another, more naïve time.
The French “The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales …,” from directors Patrick Imbert and Benjamin Renner, is based on Renner’s cartoon books, “Le grand méchant renard” and “Un bébé à livrer.” The film is a gentle collection of three stories presented as short plays put on by a farm’s theater company, made up of animals.
“The graphic novel was actually intended more for adults,” says Renner, a 2014 Oscar nominee for “Ernest & Celestine.” “Maybe somehow it’s in the animation, but we definitely aimed the film more at children.”
In the title tale, a supposedly fearsome Fox steals chicken eggs with the intent of eating the hatchlings. He ends up raising the chicks, who want to be like him.
“I really love the way the Fox talks. You don’t expect it,” says Renner, laughing. “When he’s trying to teach the [chicks] to be foxes — the children doing the voices, they were barely acting. They were just being themselves, rude, we loved it. Some things, we just caught on tape and put in the movie.”
Although Renner says he’s “of course a big fan of Pixar and many of those,” his film’s pace and gentility hark to a bygone era: “I don’t mean to be nostalgic, but [I suppose] it’s more like the pace of the older Disney movies, or even the shorts.”