The Focused Mr. Anderson

By Michael Farah

Make no mistake, the Fantastic Mr. Fox is a Wes Anderson film. All the Anderson hallmarks are there: quirky characters and set design, the subtle melancholy in tone and, of course, Bill Murray.

But whereas Anderson’s previous flicks sometimes suffer under the weight of too much twee, Fox is a refreshingly tight and (dare I say) charming movie for kids. Like Spike Jonze and his adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, Anderson seems paradoxically liberated by working on someone else’s story.

In this case, we have author Ronald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach) and his darkly humorous classic about a noble and witty fox. I confess to having not read the source material (I’m more of a BFG fan), but it’s clear that here we have a story worth telling.

The movie version, which, like all modern adaptations of children’s books, has been changed and expanded, centers on George’s Clooney’s endlessly resourceful Mr. Fox. Having given up his primary occupation as a chicken thief to settle down with Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) and a cushy reporter job, Mr. Fox is wooed back to his old ways after moving too close to a triumvirate of farms owned by the nefarious farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean (Michael Gambon). He soon recruits clueless handy-animal Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky) and then his own beguiling nephew, Kristofferson (Eric Anderson), to help with his brazen stunts of larceny. This does not sit well with Mr. Fox’s easy-to-anger son Ash (Jason Schwartzman in one of the film’s best “performances”).

When the farmers team up for revenge, things go from bad to worse for the wily Mr. Fox. The farmers’ elaborate attacks widen to threaten not only the Fox family, but the surrounding neighbors, including the family of Fox’s lawyer and confidante, Badger (the unnecessary Bill Murray). With the help of Rat (a reliably great Willem Dafoe), the farmers get the upper hand by kidnapping Kristofferson. Naturally, Mr. Fox comes up with a plan. I won’t give away the end, except to assure you there’s a reason they call Mr. Fox fantastic.

At a slim 88 minutes, the film mostly breezes along, with the exception of a few too-slow pensive moments in the middle. As for the stop-motion animation, you may feel a little disorientation in the first few minutes as you slip out of Pixar mode and into the lo-fi comforts of puppets and stilted motion. But as the layers pile on (music, character designs, sounds), you’ll come to appreciate the charms of the medium.

As with Where the Wild Things Are, the big question is: will the kids like it? And the 8-ball answer is again “reply hazy.” I want to believe that the younger generation, so steeped in video game imagery, can engage with something that took such painstaking work to look so “wrong.” The story is certainly there, and for most of its running time, the movie is paced to get where it’s going. I think the kids will dig this one.

But if they don’t? Well, Wes Anderson can take solace in the fact that he’s crafted a nicely layered, charismatic little animated movie that raised his film making game. Fantastic indeed.