Fantastic Mr. Fox

Studio: Fox Searchlight
Directed by: Wes Anderson; Starring (the voices of): George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray

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

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Average reader rating: 9/10