Plot Mr. Fox (Clooney), a fox with a high opinion of himself, is struggling to set aside his chicken-stealing habits and settle down to family life. When a trio of wicked farmers relocate to his woods, the temptation to show how fantastic he is proves too great...
Review In this era of photo-realising the fantastic and precision-made stop-motion prettyscapes, it is oddly gratifying to find that Wes Anderson, in his first sole venture into an animated universe, is having none of it. He is still busy ploughing his wry indie groove, only now in the guise of miniature foxes of rubbery complexion.
Of course, Anderson has dabbled in quirky animation before — those deep-sea sideshows in The Life Aquatic hinting atan appreciation for puppetry, and there’sa stop-motion patina to his real-world explorations, films so laidback they might have been coached into fruition frame-by-frame. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the director has ditched human actors for pipe-cleaner animals, nor that the result is so idiosyncratic, charming and funny.
This unforeseen fusion of spiky English fabulist and effacing Texan moviemaker makes sense. Despite remaining Roald Dahl’s caustic morality tale about a conceited fox, it is also demonstrably one of Anderson’s mild-mannered odes to crackpot families of neurotics and nitwits. Pompous fathers, dysfunctional offspring, and bumbling neighbours: the whole gamut of oddballs come rendered in a lo-fi stop-motion barely a twitch or two above the work of Clangers maestro Oliver Postgate from ’70s British telly. Despite the contradiction of American voices, such Bagpussian familiarity grants it a teashop Englishness that fits Dahl right on the nose. From there on, it’s liberally adapted into The Royal Tenenbaums in fur.
The story starts and finishes with Mr. Fox’s inability to settle down as he — roping in his putz of a best friend, Rickity (an opossum) — plots a series of foolish raids on nearby farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean (Dahl’s sing-song description, “one short, one fat, one lean”, is visualised with wicked panache). The upshot, amongst many, is that Mr. Fox will lose his tail (a real dent in his fox-about-town image) and the local animal community will lose its community. Meanwhile, and here comes the Wes stuff, he also can’t connect with his under-sized, self-absorbed cub, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), a situation exacerbated by the arrival of Ash’s cousin, a top-fox at sport, vixens and, so it proves, chicken robbery.
Such storytelling delight comes not in the exactitude of the animation, although it has a certain psychedelic dazzle, but how cunningly it conveys character, humour and, like Nick Park’s screwy Yorkshire, a deviant version of modern life.
Thanks to the guile of the director and his animators, the whole see-the-joins short-hand possesses a splendour of tiny nuance, like the creepy glow of cigarettes clamped in Bean’s (Michael Gambon) jaw, or a witty trick with eyeballs switching from black beads to white marbles daubed with baffled spirals. There’s a sublime marriage here of script and technique. George Clooney’s Mr. Fox is smarmy both in the actor’s unhurried delivery of his mid-life crisis and in silky texture, while Meryl Streep’s Mrs. Fox has a softness both in her sighing over a luckless marriage and in her orangeade-coloured fur that stands on end when her husband’s braggadocio leads this menagerie of Wind In The Willows drop-outs into a succession of jams. It may be slight as a feather (a quality Anderson holds dear) and vexing for Dahl purists, but for a film so outwardly bonkers, it works like a dream.
Verdict Genuinely original: a silly, hilarious and oddly profound adaptation for adult-sized children
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Average user rating for Fantastic Mr. Fox
Boggis, Bunce & Bean. One fat, one short, one lean.
Another fantastic movie from Fantastic Mr. Anderson. A silly, heartwarming and thrilling movie. This is just the kind of animated films we need. I enjoyed it like no other movie and it caused a sensation I've never felt before. Anderson and Baumach did an incredibly great adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's classic. One of the best pictures of the year, and of the decade. This is A Great Movie! ... Read More
Fantastic! A refreshing movie that had me laughing all the way through - a unique film, well it is a Wes Anderson film. For me, the quirky nature along with everything else had me hooked despite the simplistic story (which is meant to be simple BECAUSE THE BOOK WAS). It all washed well and, along with Coraline & Up, this is quality.
10/10 ... Read More
I'm torn by this, it's very much not the Roald Dahl book that I know and love, and actually, is so far from the plot and feel of it I wonder if it should really be advertised as an adaptation.
My main issue would be with Mr Fox himself, I always remembered him being incredibly likable, and charming in the book and audio tapes as a kid but I found the character really hard to warm to here, he was a typical Anderson father, which I don't think Mr Fox should have been.
That said, I think D... Read More
Absolutely loved this.
No it's not the book (which I also loved as a kid) and it's by no means a kids film, just a highly entertaining, very funny film that happens to animated.
4 stars ... Read More
it was a real disappointment to see a good story, good cast and average director go to waste on a film that has no fucking clue what it's meant to be. it doesn't really matter, cause it fails as a roald dahl story, fails as a children's film and fails as a wes anderson flick. roald dahl has a dark side to his stories for adults who understood the complexities of life and a light side for children just learning about the world, this film is so stuck on realism it ends up being dark for the wrong ... Read More
I loved the movie - I thought it was hilarious and witty and so much better than Where the Wild things Are (another children's story adapted by an unconventional director). I also liked the 'old-fashioned' stop-motion animation.
If you did like the movie I took these pictures of the Science Lab set and models at a cinema here in L.A.:
http://hollywoodmoviecostumesandprops.blogspot.com/2009 /11/fantastic-mr-fox-stop-motion-animation.html ... Read More
Just awful. Roald Dahl is widely recognised as one of the greats of children's literature writers but you absolutely would not know it judging by this travesty of a film. No magic, no charm, just a sickeningly self-indulgent series of nods and winks to Wes Anderson.
The animation was terribly weak when you compare to the work done for 'Coraline' for example. The creatures looked ugly, their personalities were irritating to a man (or quadraped) and needless additions to the cast only worsened m... Read More
Something about this just left me a little cold. Not funny enough, Dahl-esque or British for my liking. I don't see how American foxes come to be in the British countryside!
However, the animation was different, even if there were moments when I hoped it would show off the sets and things more. A points the 2D digging scenes felt like a video-game.
More liked ot have seen more from Bogis, Bunce and Bean. Only Bean (Gambon?) gets anything to say. The other two merely grunt, agree or disagree... Read More
..which for some of us is not a great thing. The characters talk incessantly, there's are raft of pointless sub-plots added and the story takes forever to go anywhere. This film has the achievement of being the first time I've nodded off in the cinema (at 4 in the afternoon!). I doubt Mr Fox's existentional crisis really reasonated with the six-year-olds in the audience. Just watch James and the Giant Peach to see how this should have been done. ... Read More
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