The Fox and the Child

Academy Award winner Kate Winslet narrates this beautifully photographed live-action film about a girl and a fox. The unnamed redheaded 10-year-old (Bertille Noël-Bruneau) initially spots the creature—whom she names Lily—while riding her bike home from school through a forest bordering the French Alps. Although she resolves to befriend the fox, Lily disappears. Leafy autumn bows to snowy winter as the girl continues to seek Lily, while deeper in the forest the fox forages for rodents, roughhouses with companions, and tries to avoid the clutches of a hungry lynx (wolves and bears will come later). Using time-lapse photography, director Luc Jacquet depicts the transition to dewy spring, at which point a hunter briefly materializes, making it even more difficult for Lily to trust the harmless human child. The girl does ultimately establish a tentative rapport with her furry friend, but during the process also learns that a wild animal remains so. As with his Oscar-winning documentary March of the Penguins, Jacquet's French-language film has been retrofitted for American audiences (with some distracting minor lip-sync discrepancies in the dubbing of the girl's occasional bits of dialogue and singing), and while a few sequences may be too intense for younger children, this enchanting film is otherwise highly recommended. (K. Fennessy)