Fantastic Mr Fox
Wes Anderson's wonderful take on Fantastic Mr Fox
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By James Christie. |  |
Monday, 26, Oct 2009 10:47
Directed by Wes Anderson, out October 23rd in cinemas, starring George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Michael Gambon and Brian Cox, running time 87 mins.
In a nutshell...
Fantastic by name, fantastic by nature
What's it all about
The eponymous Mr Fox (Clooney) bites off more than he can chew when he reverts to type in Wes Anderson's stop-motion remake of Roald Dahl's beloved children's classic. After giving up a life of crime to care for his wife (Streep) and scrawny son (Schwartzman) he finds a return to his old chicken-thieving ways irresistible when he finds his new tree trunk home overlooks his old haunts, the land of stinking rich farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean ("One fat, one short, one lean"), putting the rest of his animal companions in mortal danger from the eventual retribution.
Who's in it?
George Clooney truly injects the fantastic into his Mr Fox, allowing the rest of the cast - in co-star Bill Murray's words - to "maypole" around his creation. He receives just as fantastic support in the form of multiple Academy award-nominated actress Meryl Streep and a host of Wes Anderson regulars, including Murray (Badger).
Jason Schwartzman plays it down and grumpy as Clooney's underperforming son, while Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody all have cameos. British actors Brian Cox and Michael Gambon also feature as an enterprising news anchor and lead evil farmer Franklin Bean.
As an exampe...
Mrs Fox: "You know, you really are... fantastic."
Mr Fox: "I try."
Mr Fox: "Honey, I am seven fox years old. My father died at seven and a half. I don't want to live in a hole anymore, and I'm going to do something about it."
Coach Skip: "Whack-bat's real simple. There's three grabbers, three taggers, five twig runners, and a player at whack-bat. Centre tagger lights a pine cone and chucks it over the basket and the whack-batter tries to hit the cedar stick off the cross rock. Twig runners dash back and forth until the pine cone burns out, then you count up however many score-downs it adds up to and divide that by nine."
What the others say
"From the fox-red glow of a morning idyll to the noirish gutter scene where one character meets his end to the icy fluorescent glare of the film's closing scene - happy but not without compromise - Fox is a visual delight." - Hollywood Reporter
"As the larky individual opposed to the brutish human world, Clooney makes a fantastic Mr Fox.
"And though Wes Anderson may have cocked a cheeky leg on some childhood memories, he has produced a distinctively individual work of art and entertainment." - Evening Standard
So is it any good?
The old arguments about American film versions of quintessentially British literary works being a disgrace mercifully do not apply to Fantastic Mr Fox, not because Wes Anderson has stayed especially faithful to the source material (he hasn't), not because he's flooded it with English talent (he didn't), but because he's done a good job.
The aesthetic eccentricities of the director are in every scene of his beautiful stop motion animation of Roald Dahl's (beloved) children's book, from the close ups of a bristling Mr and Mrs Fox in their wild animal days and the long drawn-out cross-section sequences to the awkwardly-cool dialogue and folky rock soundtrack, supplied from time to time by Jarvis Cocker in this case.
Anderson is no different from the rest of the English-speaking world in being a staunch Dahl fan. In his movie the novel first published in the 1970s forms the latter half of the story, Anderson going to great pains to flesh out the back story of Mr and Mrs Fox.
Their lives change forever when Mrs Fox announces she is pregnant; not wanting her husband to be risking his life with rabid beagles, shotguns and spring-loaded cages when she has a cub in the oven.
But a journalistic career change leaves Mr Fox wanting for more, first a move overground from the family hole to a glorious tree. It is from said tree, bought from a real estate weasel, that Mr Fox espies the not-so-distant farms of Boggis, Bunce and Bean, where the temptation proves too much and he once again dons the bandit mask of his past, risking his and his family's lives and - much more dangerously - breaking a promise to Mrs Fox.
Clooney's Mr Fox is a Vulpus vulpus struggling to contend with the disappointment he feels in his "different", stunted son Ash, compounded by the arrival of his star athlete nephew Kristofferson. Things take a further turn for the worse when, for his most daring mission yet, he gives his nephew his own bandit mask and brings him along for the ride, provoking Bean and his fellow farmers into swearing the destruction of Mr Fox, whatever the cost.
Dahl fans will find themselves in familiar territory at this point, but in a madcap finish Anderson gets his message across that you can take the fox out of the chicken coop, but he'll still be a wild animal at heart (best illustrated in the stand-out scene with the one animal Mr Fox actually fears).
Anderson's movie is the first of three Clooney films shown at the London Film Festival this month. Up in the Air and Men Who Stare at Goats will struggle to match the arresting visual impact or flippant beauty of Fantastic Mr Fox.
It's not a comedy, it will rarely make you laugh, but it is an entertainment that will make you smile, almost non-stop.
It's zany, it's mad-cap, it's gorgeous to look at... it's fantastic.
8/10
Matthew Champion