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Nov 30, 2009 By Evan Rytlewski Web Exclusive

In spite of their finely tailored clothes, the animated creatures in Fantastic Mr. Fox aren’t little furry humans, à la Disney. They’re wild animals, with dirty, cavity-ridden teeth and barbaric primal instincts. They kill chickens in one bite. They devour their meals in a noisy fury. When they disagree with each other, they snarl and bear their teeth, or slash each other with their claws.

There’s a constant tension between their civil society and their feral nature, and no one is more consumed by it than Mr. Fox‘s title character, a thrill-seeking animal poacher who gave up the fast life to raise a son and work at a newspaper, where he writes a column he fears that nobody reads. When Mr. Fox moves his family into a tree across from a trio of gourmet farms, he can’t resist the temptation to go back in for one last score—and then a succession of additional final scores, inciting the farmers to wage a war on him that jeopardizes the entire animal community.

Voiced with gregarious flair by George Clooney, Mr. Fox is the archetypical Wes Anderson hero, a larger-than-life egoist encumbered by self-imposed pressure to live up to his own fabulous reputation. Anderson also includes many of his other signatures: neurotic characters who bluntly state their feelings; long shots that pan across busy, elaborately staged sets; a Rolling Stones song; a part for Bill Murray. As Mr. Fox’s spiteful, difficult son, Jason Schwartzman reads dialogue that could have been pulled straight from Rushmore.

Though it’s animated in stop-motion and ostensibly a children’s movie, Fantastic Mr. Fox limits its concessions to kids to just a goofy character or two. At times the movie is almost comically un-kid friendly. In one scene, Mr. Fox takes out a mortgage. In another, he speaks an inordinate amount of Latin. It’s difficult to gauge Mr. Fox‘s effectiveness as a children’s movie—at the screening I attended, kids were few and far between, and conspicuously silent—but as a Wes Anderson movie, it’s another triumph, another loving, dryly funny tale about the trials and ultimate redemption of a flawed big dreamer.

(www.fantasticmrfoxmovie.com)

Author rating: 8/10