Movie Review - 'Fantastic Mr. Fox'

Fantastic Mr. Fox Starring George Clooney, Meryl Streep, and Jason Schwartzman Directed by Wes Anderson Rated PG

Somehow, Wes Anderson has brought a very familiar story by Roald Dahl into his own idiosyncratic filmmaking style, and while Fantastic Mr. Fox is a stop-motion animated story of a fox and his war with three human farmers, this is as much a Wes Anderson movie as Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums. That also means it's a bit of a reworking of Dahl's original, but as with any good adaptation, it does exactly that: Fantastic Mr. Fox is Wes Anderson's interpretation of the story, refitted to his own unique approach. The nuts and bolts of the story are mostly unchanged: Fox (George Clooney) robs three evil farmers, Boggis, Bunce, and Bean of their wares. It's primarily stuff you'd expect a fox to steal, like chickens, but Fox loves the art of the scheme more than he needs the food. In that regard, he's more a Thomas Crown character than anything else. Angered, the three farmers try their dead level best to root Fox out of his hole to make him pay for his crimes. But he's clever, of course, so that turns out to be the comeuppance of our villains. In reality, Anderson has stripped this story as bare as he could. The central characters remain intact- although the ensemble has some cosmetic alerations that fall squarely under the banner of creative license - and the journey really is that simple. The story Anderson and frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach come up to advance this journey stops just short of being consistently hilarious but it's still remarkably entertaining. As with most of Anderson's work, the truly bizarre supporting characters and their motivations serve the primary story and are worth a closer look on their own, such as Fox's son (Jason Schwartzman) and his petty jealousy over his cousin's athletic prowess and luck with the ladies. "You're supposed to be my lab partner," young Ash chides Agnes in science class after shooting cousin Kristofferson the eye. "I am your lab partner," replies the blushing fox. "No you're not," huffs the puny Ash. "You're disloyal." The absurdity rises to the top early and often here, and I wonder how entertaining this treatment really is for children. I don't even know if Anderson made it with kids in mind so much as, like Spike Jonze and Where the Wild Things Are, he made it for people who hated having to grow up. Beyond the way the film reads and its nearly perfect tempo (punctuated, as always, by Anderson's impeccable ear for music, one of the most tasteful among working directors), there is still the complicated matter of putting an 80-something-minute stop-motion movie together. Thousands of tiny posables in carefully constructed Barbie Dream Houses, shot frame by frame and assembled later. It's more or less a two-year process and you can't possibly cut corners and not have it show. Fantastic Mr. Fox is a wonderfully subversive little film, full of big, obvious laughs and the ones you don't even get until after the fact. It may not be suitable for tots for several reasons, but you can just leave them in the car or let them walk the mall unsupervised, I suppose.

Comments

[Susan]

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[Susan]

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[beco baby carrier]

Thousands of tiny posables in carefully constructed Barbie Dream Houses, shot frame by frame and assembled later. It's more or less a two-year process and you can't possibly cut corners and not have it show.

[vessel sinks]

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