The Tale of the Fox

Adapted from Goethe's fable - about a fox whose carnivorous cunning, deplored and feared by the rest of the animal kingdom, brings him into legal conflict with the lion king - this vintage animated film impresses, first of all, by the sheer virtuosity of its stop-motion puppet work. Some sequences feature literally dozens of immaculate creatures on superbly detailed sets. Its creator, Wladyslaw Starewicz (1882-1965), was a Polish-Lithuanian who moved to France after the Soviet revolution, whose work today is known mostly by reputation. ‘The Tale of the Fox’ is marked by a sardonic wit. Much of the frantic violence puts Tom and Jerry to shame, and much of the imagery - hares drunk on communion wine, tightrope walking mice, a castle filled with Heath Robinson battle contraptions - springs from a genuinely surreal imagination.