1/2

This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Cheeky, original, funny, satisfyingly silly and even a bit profound, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, like Where the Wild Things Are, is a quirky delight for children and the child hopefully still residing in every adult.

In director Wes Anderson’s quirky, stop-motion animated take on Roald Dahl’s children’s classic, we are introduced to the Fox family: Mr. Fox (voice of George Clooney), Mrs. Fox (voice of Meryl Streep) and their insecure son, Ash (voice of Jason Schwartzman), all of whom have, for 12 years, lived a peaceable life in a perfectly satisfactory hole in the ground. It’s the peaceable part that is driving Mr. Fox bonkers, though you’d never know it from his good-natured, urbane exterior. When he and the Mrs. met, he was the best chicken thief around, a lifestyle Mrs. Fox forced him to leave behind once their son was born. But while you might be able to take the fox out of the hen house, you can’t take the hen house out of the fox. Mr. Fox, now an unfulfilled newspaper editorialist, misses the thrill of the hunt and can no longer repress his animal instincts. First he moves his family out of their subterranean home into a tree house, (all of this over his wife’s protestations, who reminds him that foxes live in holes for a reason) and then sets his sights on three farms visible on the horizon.

Telling his family he is off for one assignment or another, the wily Mr. Fox uses all his cunning to begin raiding the farms of Boggis, Bunce and Bean, stealing off into the night with fresh booty. The trouble is, he picked the wrong farmers to steal from—vicious men who will stop at nothing to kill Mr. Fox and protect what is rightfully theirs. The men tear down the tree where the foxes make their home, driving them underground. Undeterred, the farmers begin blasting at the earth to get to their crafty prey. Suddenly what seemed like a fun, mid-life diversion becomes a danger to Mr. Fox’s family as well as the entire animal community. In the face of dwindling food supplies and ever-increasing assaults on their hiding places, the animals have no choice but to rally behind Mr. Fox and fight their oppressors.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox is pure psychedelic deliciousness. It is astonishing how many of director Anderson’s (Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited) unusual visual flourishes, production design decisions and chief visuals survive the journey from live action to the marvelously retro animation. The very things that make an Anderson film so unique and such a joy to watch are all here. Fox has a curious transatlantic delineation, pitting American accents (the animals; Bill Murray and Willem Dafoe also lend their voices) against strapping British brogue (the humans, led menacingly by Michael Gambon). The Fantastic Mr. Fox is wonderfully retro, incorporating a snarky 60s and 70s aesthetic and buttressed by the predictable brilliant soundtrack. This is the sort of film in which Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns rest comfortably alongside a world reminiscent of Wallace and Gromit, and where the word “cuss,” used in the place of real profanity, becomes a charming spoken motif.

It is fitting that George Clooney should headline The Fantastic Mr. Fox because it is very much a caper film in the tradition of Oceans 11. Anderson captures the jaunty tone perfectly and translates it into a world inhabited by talking animals who dress in suits and read newspapers as if they were, well, human. But Anderson suggests that it is this very thing that is destroying what makes them so special, so…fascinating. Though Mr. Fox is often a stubborn fool who ignores the common sense advice of everyone around him when it contradicts his own rapacious desires (more often than not to the detriment of all those around him), he is right in at least one respect—he is, in his heart, a wild animal and he likes it that way. The tame, domesticated life is suffocating who he was born to be. Through this simple metaphor, Anderson seems to be saying something about you and me as well.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox is much more compatible with younger viewers than Where the Wild Things Are, the other children’s book adaptation from earlier this summer. Though Anderson has unmistakably made the film for viewers like himself—adults who were once the voracious young consumers of such material—he only rarely oversteps the line of what constitutes a film that children can ingest. But while there truly is “something fantastic about being different,” it does make one wonder when we’ll see an adaptation of our favorite childhood magic uncorrupted by mature hispterism and post-modern elucidation.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.