ABSTRACT
Adapted from a medieval European folktale, The Tale of the Fox/Le Roman de Renard (Ladislas and Irène Starevitch, 1941) is France’s first animated feature film. Despite the seeming straightforwardness of this claim of national identity, such an assertion ultimately proves inadequate. There is no purely “French” culture; “France” is the result of an assimilation and reaction to the cultures of other imagined communities. The same process led to the formation of a “French” cinema and “French” animation. This chapter investigates Le Roman de Renard’s national and transnational identity by reviewing the state of animation in France at the time as recorded by historians in this field—Sébastien Roffat, Richard Neupert and Giannalberto Bendazzi—as well as by chronicling the film’s production and delayed release from 1930 to 1941. This approach depicts Le Roman de Renard as both the product of an immigrant directorial team that would come to be viewed as champions of French animation as well as a transnational text with a history of crossing borders beyond the context of its initial production.
