Animation Movies 2013 list

A sneaky fox plays a series of underhand tricks on his neighbours in the animal kingdom, among them a timorous hare and a gullible wolf. The king of the beasts, a lion, summons him to face charges but the fox proceeds to outwit everyone, including the king himself. When Ladislas Starevich told this tale in the 1930s it was by no means new – versions of the Reynard story had been circulating around Europe for the best part of a millennium – but the means of telling it were utterly novel. Animated over 18 months from 1929 to 1930 (and premiering after a long delay in 1937, in Nazi Berlin), Starevich's beguiling film is often cited as the one of the earliest animated features ever made; it's certainly one of the first features composed of stop-motion animation.

What's striking, eight decades on, is just how sophisticated it is. By 1930, Starevich had been directing stop-motion films for 20 years – he started out making short films using dead insects in what is now Lithuania; after the October revolution, he emigrated to France and continued making films there until the 1960s. The Tale of the Fox is a testament to his great skill as an animator: the anthropomorphised cast (an unscrupulous badger barrister, a courtier cat with eyes for the queen) are remarkably expressive and the film-making brims with invention. In the process of tricking the poor old wolf for the umpteenth time, the fox conjures up a gourmand's vision of heaven that recalls the imaginative flights of Georges Méliès (whose neglected studio in Paris Starevich used after arriving in France). There are extended dream sequences and, at the climax, when the king has been exasperated into all-out military action, a comically protracted siege on the fox's lofty lair involving many pulleys and swinging logs. It's hard to imagine that Wes Anderson, in preparation for The Fantastic Mr Fox, didn't watch Starevich's film with an attentive eye, and pick up a trick or two in the process.