Le renard et l'enfant (2007)

User Rating:

6.6/10   

Director:

Luc Jacquet

Writers:

Luc Jacquet (writer)
Eric Rognard (scenario)

Release Date:

12 December 2007 (Belgium)

Genre:

Adventure | Drama | Family

Plot:

It has been described as both a nature doc and "fairy tale" look at the story of young girl and her friendship with a fox. |

Plot Keywords:

Animal In Title | Character Name In Title

Awards:

2 nominations

Cast

Bertille Noël-Bruneau	...	L'enfant
Isabelle Carré	...	Narrator / L'enfant adulte
Thomas Laliberté	...	Le petit garçon
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Ambra Angiolini	...	Narrator (voice)
Kate Winslet	...	Narrator (voice: English version)

Also Known As:

The Fox & the Child (International: English title)
The Fox and the Child (Australia)

Runtime:

92 min

Country:

France

Language:

French

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

DTS | Dolby Digital

Certification:

Switzerland:7 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:7 (canton of Vaud) | Germany:o.Al. | Finland:K-7 | Ireland:G | Hong Kong:I | Singapore:G | Sweden:Btl | USA:G | Mexico:A | Australia:G

Filming Locations:

France

Company:

Bonne Pioche

Trivia:

Actually, there were used about 10 foxes as "le renard".

Movie Connections:

Referenced in On the Trail of the Fox (2009)

Very beautiful, but flawed from a literary perspective

This film shows very beautiful and very diverse pictures of animals, landscapes and weather. It is also worth viewing as a touching story of the personal development of a young girl, emotionally maturing during her friendship with the fox. Young children will also enjoy the film as a - though somewhat conventional - adventure story.

Unfortunately, even though many emotions are beautifully depicted using fine literary and cinematographic means, the film has an annoying tendency to also work with very old-fashioned, heavy-handed narrative techniques. In particular, the girl's emotions as well as the lessons she learns from her adventures are often rehashed in explicit comments from an intrusive narrative voice, in fact her own voice as she remembers her adventures a decade later. This gets particularly irritating in those cases where those comments are given repeatedly. Usually, the intrusive narrator just restates emotions that are obvious anyway, but in a few cases, her comments are even required to fully understand details of the plot.

Besides, the plot contains a few gaps that seem hard to fill in; you might perhaps call some of them inconsistencies, harming the overall credibility of the film. So, you will need to take it with a grain of salt, and definitely with a larger dose of passion than of reason and logic...

All the same, viewing the film together with your six to eleven year old children will probably be a rewarding experience, providing lots of subject matters to be discussed afterwards.