I was looking forward to "The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales...". The French film was animated and directed by the same team as Academy-award nominated "Ernest & Celestine," a clever adaptation of a children's book and mature piece of storytelling and animation. It had a special visual style, like a moving watercolor painting with ink outlines highlighting the absurd cartoon animals of the movie. "The Big Bad Fox" repeats that same excellent visual style, much to my relief. However, as a family cartoon with little ambition, the movie took a long time to be released in North America; over a year after its release in France, I happened to get a rare chance to see it at a one-day family event in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with any chance of a larger theatrical or home video release by GKIDS likely another year away.And who can blame them? The title alone makes it difficult to market. "and Other Tales..." makes it sound like an anthology of short stories, and that's very much what it is. The story takes place under the frame of a stage play, hosted by a timid fox in a bow-tie, introducing each act as a separate story by a crew of animals struggling to keep everything together. The fox acts out the film's title in the middle story, where he struggles to be taken seriously as a ferocious chicken stealer, even by the baby chicks he barely manages to steal. The first story is of a serious-minded pig desparately trying to keep his dimwitted neighbors (a duck and a rabbit) from ruining a chance job of delivering a stork's human baby to its parents, and the last story reunites that same trio in a misadventure to "save Christmas." While the stories are distinct, the farmyard setting (presumed to be on a stage) remains the same, and many of the same characters return in between each story. It's an odd way to organize a movie. The stories are each about 25 minutes long, perfectly suited for separate television pilot episodes rather than a single film. And reportedly, that was the original intention. To see these characters in multiple stories might carry more weight if the characters were familiar, if perhaps they were adapted from a well-known children's book. That too was the intention: director Benjamin Renner is both a French animator and cartoonist, and a couple years earlier he had published comic books featuring these same characters. It feels like the movie came a little too quickly... either wait a bit longer for the comic to gain more attention, or build on it as a television series. The series likely fell through, leaving this as a last-minute attempt to make "something" out of the effort so that the animators could focus on new projects. I suppose Disney's "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" started out the same way, and like Disney, the filmmakers seem to have a great love for what they are doing with "The Big Bad Fox" behind the scenes. It's undeniable that this is an absolutely fun movie and perfect to share with kids. The characters are delightfully funny and sometimes overbearingly cute. I don't mind their one-dimensional personalities, rather, I love them all the more for it. I want keychains and plush toys of the wolf and the baby chicks. Jokes come quickly in dialogue and action, an old-fashioned example of slapstick humor a la Daffy Duck, with a slight bent to a British sensability. Who could hate that? The attention to the amount of jokes shows the care put into the movie, sometimes showing off the love they have for the cartoon medium. Watch closely, and you'll see a quick reference to Studio Ghibli's "Totoro." Stay through the end of the credits, and you'll read among the cast and crew a lovely recipe for homemade crepes to finish off your day. 
The first screening I saw of the movie was of an English dub (presumably it was originally in French). The actors are generally good, all with very British accents, some sounding much like more famous and distinguished voices (instead, the credits reveal most of them to be relatively unknown). At times, the scriptwriters go the extra mile: the wolf is a sinister gentleman, and will sometimes use French phrases like "mon ami" to make him appear well-cultured before he attempts to dine on one of the other animals. The movie was officially listed as being in "English and Mandarin," for one of the side characters speaks only in Chinese with no subtitles (leading to one of the funnier exchanges between two English characters: "You understand Chinese?" "Sure. Don't you?"). But this was originally a French movie, and like most dubs of such movies, the dialog is fast and has weird pacing to keep up with lip flaps. I can't tell if I would refer the original French, but I suspect that is the case here."The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales" isn't an ambitious film, but within its scope, its artists do the best they can to knock it out of the park. It isn't much more than a fun family film, but such a delightful cast of characters that can be enjoyed by all ages (from the very young to very old) isn't something to write off. So what if the film isn't as big and bad as it ought to be? Sometimes, I prefer a cute little film anyway.