With his hypnotic distillations of human movement and his almost maniacally rigorous visual sense, director/designer Robert Wilson would appear to be a disastrous choice to tackle Jean de La Fontaine’s fables about nature in all its ungovernable messiness. One would just as soon ask an intuitive daredevil such as Robert Woodruff to plumb the inner life of a supercomputer.

And yet the Comédie-Française, France’s national theater, took that gamble in 2004 when it enlisted Mr. Wilson to adapt “Fables de La Fontaine,” a beloved fixture of French cultural life dating back to the 17th century. The marriage of control and chaos proved to be a felicitous one, and “Fables” is now a brisk and inviting centerpiece of this year’s Lincoln Center Festival.

The sanctimonious ants, vain crows, and Solomonic monkeys that people La Fontaine’s instructive tales may still play by the director’s meticulous rules; each frog hiccup and monkey scratch feels soldered into place. But Mr. Wilson has isolated the mischievous wit and sobering melancholy within 19 of these oft-told stories, holding an exquisite mirror up to the allegedly evolved species who observe the animals’ tightly choreographed follies.

This blend of wonderment and wariness is captured from the play’s first moments as the character of La Fontaine himself, who shares narrating duties with various members of his menagerie, capers downstage to the sprightly sound of a harpsichord. (The whimsical, period-hopping music is by Michael Galasso.) More than a dozen animals then emerge one by one, most of them wearing masks and beautifully cut suits, each engaging in zoologically appropriate riffs on Mr. Wilson’s trademark slow-motion stride.

Mr. Wilson quickly undercuts this “Lion King”-meets-Giorgio Armani aesthetic, however, by having LaFontaine (played by the actress Christine Fersen) regard the brood warily, waving a scented handkerchief under his nose. These are animals, after all, and they quickly disclose their base, self-serving natures through a series of vignettes, none of them lasting more than five minutes.

The power of fables, of course, comes from the fact that the animals’ attributes are recognizably, inescapably human, so much so that even children can grasp the lessons contained therein. (The La Fontaine biographer Marc Fumaroli employs a glorious word for this notion: animallégorie.)

It is because of this universality that his 245 fables, while much better known in France, have crossed so many linguistic boundaries. Pushkin translated them; so did Marianne Moore. (Norman B. Spector’s translations are printed in the “Fables” program.) And it’s not hard to see why: They layer Aesop’s moral clarity with taut, fine-boned French verse.

The minimal supertitles on display, however, convey little of this verbal dexterity. Mr. Wilson shows his usual painterly command at creating tableaux with an almost monastic silence, but even when the narrators and creatures break that silence, the play’s translations are skeletal and inadequate. Stripped of its silky couplets (at least for non-French-speakers), “Fables de La Fontaine” takes on a darker cast. The creatures face their often bleak futures in either stricken silence or, on several occasions, agonized screams. The latter fate befalls a lion in the evening’s first fable: A giggling female human declaws the lovestruck beast with a pair of garden shears, resulting in the defenseless animal’s death. La Fontaine clearly pins responsibility for this act on the woman’s father, and so Mr. Wilson’s innovation begins “Fables” on an offputting, misogynist note.

His unerring visual sense is on discreet display throughout, from his pastel-heavy lighting design to his austere silhouette images: “The Oak and the Reed,” a testament to flexibility, is conceived as a virtual shadow play. And he plays with scale to winning effect. A giant lion’s head diminishes the actor playing a gnat, and a similar contrast comes into play during a delightfully bizarre tale of a frog’s doomed effort to equal an ox in size. (The attempt, conveyed by swelling a green balloon to the breaking point, is scuttled by a long pin that emerges ominously from a side wall. The oblivious ox reads a newspaper all the while.)

In “The Cicada and the Ant,” the cicada learns the dangers of frittering away the summer once winter rolls around. Mr. Wilson contrasts her flighty ways (Coraly Zahonero is dressed like a Jazz Age flapper, alluring but wholly unprepared for the cold) with those of the ant (Madeleine Marion), who spends the entire sequence darting back and forth across the stage, her arms pinwheeling and tongue clucking with military precision. Her body language hews more closely to Mr. Wilson’s stage vocabulary than any other animal — and perhaps this is no coincidence. After all, despite the lure of escapist fun, the ant’s efforts have given her the sustenance she needs to survive. With “Fables de La Fontaine,” Mr. Wilson’s labors prove similarly fruitful.

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