Fantastic Mr. Fox
Director: Wes Anderson; animation direction by Mark Gustafson
Writers: Screenplay by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, based on the novel by Roald Dahl
Producers: Allison Abbate, Scott Rudin, Jeremy Dawson
Featuring the Vocal Talents of: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Wallace Wolodarsky, Eric Chase Anderson, Michael Gambon, Willem Dafoe, Brian Cox, Hugo Guinness
I have no idea how kids will process Fantastic Mr. Fox, but I am joyful that it exists. It is not immediately intuitive to marry the frank and impassioned awkwardness of co-writer/director Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Darjeeling Limited) to Roald Dahl’s warm fable of the little guys thumbing the big and greedy in their collective eyes. It is not the contemporary wisdom to make an animated film in stop-motion animation when powerful computers are available.
These strange alliances have yielded a truly unique treat – a family film that mixes retro Hollywood artistry with backyard playfulness; that is both anarchic and wise, and which I hope will draw kids in as opposed to animation’s usual way of shouting deliriously at them. The movie captivates because both its warmth and strangeness are tangible; Anderson’s work has sometimes wrapped itself so snugly in its own eccentricities that you cannot access its heart. But coming after his most emotionally-realized film The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox shows him still confident with his muse.
There are layers to the film that will sail over the children’s heads; such as when the movie impishly quotes Rebel Without a Cause, or recreates Charles Foster Kane’s enraged yet so-deliberate destruction of a room. Willem Dafoe’s performance as a sinister Rat has a whole encyclopedia of film history inside. And it is doubtful they will know what it means when Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) tells Mr. Fox (George Clooney) “I love you too, but I shouldn’t have married you.”
But this is perhaps why the marriage of Anderson and Dahl works so well. Anderson writes characters and relationships that love their own brokenness, whereas Dahl’s stories and novels like James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory have seduced generation after generation of children with their grimness wrapped in whismy. The children in his books have adventures that are more extraordinary than our own, but also live in worlds far more horrible. Dahl, who lived a long, full life defying tragedy, was giving us a sneak preview of the world as it really was, and preparing us to face both the best and worst of it with spirit.
This is the tale of Mr. Fox – a wily thief, and how his wife convinced him with her pregnancy that it was time to leave that life behind. Now comfortably domestic, writing a lifestyle column for the local paper, Fox feels that old itch to misbehave when he discovers their new tree home is right in the backyards of the notoriously greedy and loutish farmers Boggis (Brian Cox), Bunce (Hugo Guinness), and Bean (Michael Gambon).
Meanwhile, Fox’s son Ash (Jason Schwartzman, channeling Max Fischer’s passive-aggressive willpower) is experiencing a lifetime’s worth of intense sibling rivalry all at once, with the arrival of older, more charismatic, and more athletic cousin Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson). It is so rare that the characters in a children’s story should have such juicy flaws, should contribute so actively to their own unhappy circumstances.
Fox cannot resist challenging the farmers’ security to get at their prized chickens and apple cider, but in their vengeance they are digging up the whole countryside with bulldozers. This is wrecking both his community and his marriage. Anderson has an approach to filming the action of burglary and flight (Fox and all his animal friends are world-class diggers) that is proudly 2-dimensional, reminiscent of his cutaway submarine in The Life Acquatic With Steve Zissou. It is storybook-like, and the critters, sculpted by the animation team that made Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, are tangibly hand-made. You could imagine yourself dragging them by an arm as you romped through your own yard.
It is undeniably a Wes Anderson movie, from its poignant choices in pop music accompaniment, to its unerring sense for the random aside, to the way it can make explosions of temper and resentment queerly hilarious. In one scene, Fox and his accountant Badger (Bill Murray) get into a heated disagreement, in which all the “adult” words are replaced by the word “cuss”, and climaxes with them snarling and clawing at the air like the animals they are – and at the same time you are laughing, you realize how perfectly-themed it is to Anderson’s work, where neither words nor passions themselves are ever completely adequate to express what’s inside.
Clooney conveys both his suaveness and humor perfectly in voice, but also pokes fun at it – it reminded me of Mel Gibson literally becoming the cock-of-the-walk in the Dreamworks/Aardman Animation collaboration Chicken Run. Much of the company of Anderson veterans like Murray and Owen Wilson, as well as non-actors like celebrity chef Mario Batali and British rock star Jarvis Cocker, provide fascinating vocal performances; they are not as expressive or musical as you normally expect from animation, but they have innate personality in their timbre, and Anderson has groomed them to give nothing but the utmost sincerity. You would normally court disaster by asking a filmmaker with almost no animation experience to violate so many fundamental rules of how to make an animated film, but the gamble has paid off handsomely here.
I have spent a long time not talking about Fantastic Mr. Fox as a story about a lovable critter who breaks into farms and steals the farmer’s goods to feed his kind. Maybe it is because that part is so easy to summarize, and so diminishing of what the movie actually does. Its free-wheeling, infectious strangeness, its enticements to us to dance and play and celebrate being alive in a world with so much unhappiness and danger, are really like nothing else in theatres right now. 2009 has been a treasure of a year for kids at the movies, and this is another prime example of why.