The Fox and the Child (2007)

This movie gave me a magnificent end for winter vacations... A real visual poem, and a simple, fascinating story with a so meaningful message that left me with happy, copious tears: the friendship between a little girl and a fox from the forest. A beautiful, timeless fable concerning the value of friendship, love... and the risk of confusing these feelings with the selfish possession of friends or loved ones, because, as the narrator says: "I understood that I wouldn't retain it if I bound it to me". It's just great: the story, the photography, the music, the characters... I remembered so many moments of my childhood through the little girl that opened her innocent eyes to wilderness and its fascinating world, and I wept happily for those times I tried to retain somebody to me, and finally I had to let him/her go. It makes you smile, weep, think, and grow. A 20/10 to French cinema for this sweet masterwork.See it, admire it, make it yours... It will become one of your favorites.

This was promoted as a kid's film so I've got the DVD to watch with my 5 year old daughter who is learning French, thinking I am showing her a serene French film on the friendship of a girl and a fox, although she didn't want to with the fear of scary scenes. But this is absolutely not suitable for young children because of a violent scene where the fox jumps out of a closed window and breaks its neck. For the next few minutes we are subjected to the bloody body of the fox. My little kid just saw for a second the fallen fox with the bloody neck and then Iturned it off, but even that sight shattered her. She cried inconsolably. She was also bored before that, asking me when the film would be over. I feel terrible for subjecting her to this and will never make her watch even a children's film before I see it first.

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.

I went to see this movie with the most positive expectations. I had seen Jacquet's previous movie (march of the penguins) and had heard a very positive review of this one on the radio. However, I was severely disappointed. Most of all, this movie is terribly boring. Literally NOTHING happens. I tried to describe the content of the movie to a friend, and we both ended up laughing because I could only stammer things like "well then the winter comes, and then spring, and then there's an eagle, and a river, and one time it is dark, and the girl goes into a cave, and another time the fox has babies" and so on. After about half an hour I began sighing, yawning, rolling my eyes, cursing the reviewer at the radio station, and hoping that it would be over soon. But the movie went on and on. When it finally ended I had sunken so deep into my chair that I must have looked somewhat similar to Stephen Hawking. The most annoying parts of the movie are (a) The girl, who is obviously there to give children someone to identify with. She wears the same clothes throughout the entire movie (one year), and shows exactly two facial expressions: Joy and Seriousness. She is cute, no question about that. However, a movie about the beauty of nature like this one would have done better without her all-too-human presence. I found myself constantly hoping that she might get eaten by a bear, drown in the river, or something similarly terrible. (b) The commentary by the girl's adult voice, which tells us nothing but negligible, obvious, boring, redundant things. (c) The music, which is desperately lacking subtlety. When the girl is happily jumping around, the music jumps around, too. When the fox is threatened by an eagle, the music becomes threatening, too. It reminded me of the very early days of film-making, and was just too predictable to enjoy. Admittedly, many of the children who saw the movie with me did obviously like it, at least they got somehow involved. Thus, my warning concerns adults only: If you are over ten years old, avoid this movie. You can get a better (and cheaper) sleep in most other places.