Sionnach in the pasture
We could hear the sheep in the next field bleating restlessly; but, the cows were unphased by this interloper, who was on the scent of a hare and not to be put off its course.
Just last Sunday I got a matinee ticket to see "The Fox and the Child." There were only six of us in the theater: Three adults and three children and I was the only one without a child and frankly, it wasn't a children's film. The ultimate moral of the story is to let the wild things be wild. "Love will not tolerate possession".
Most of the children who see these films come from suburban and urban settings and are afraid enough of nature. There were wolves and bears and dark labyrinthine caves... if anything, it would discourage them from ever venturing past the local manicured park. Children who are raised in rural settings are generally taught a healthy respect for what is wild; and would never be allowed to venture into the forest alone even with good navigational skills.
The children I have "interviewed" about the film didn't like it and found it scary (ages 8 & 10 respectively). The children in the theatre this past Sunday looked to be under the age of 6.
It's a beautifully rendered cautionary tale; BUT, 'Titus' the fox who was featured died a few months after the film was made. Yes, he lived beyond the average life-expectancy of a fox; but, not in the wild and there's something surreal about subjecting any animal (wild or domesticated) to film-making... here's an example from one of the articles I read...
"The hardest sequence to capture, Baroni recalls, was of a lynx (played by Youk, one of her irritated lynxes whose sleep we disturbed) chasing Ziza (one of the stand-in's for Titus). It lasts only a few breath-stopping minutes, but took 2½ months to shoot: “We were filming in the snow, which means every time you leave tracks you have to wait for more snow to fall, or you have to move.” Baroni refuses to reveal how the scene was done, but says no technical wizardry was involved. The crew often had no alternative but to be patient. “Say we’d been working on a scene with three cameras. If we needed a fourth camera, it could take anything from two hours to three days for the fox to get used to that new camera.”
I wonder too, how they could justify contriving a situation repeatedly which must have been frustrating for the Lynx and terrifying for the fox. Neither of these animals were raised in the wild and these stressful conditions must have taken their toll.
It's hard not to condemn the film-makers for the very crime they were trying to illustrate and prevent... I don't consider myself a critic; just can't help saying something when words and acts are inconsistent. Sometimes the good is the enemy of the best...
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