“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is a proudly analog animated entertainment, making its
handmade way into a marketplace glutted with digital goodies. Next to the
three-dimensional, computer-generated creatures that swoop and soar off the
screen these days, the furry talking animals on display here, with their matted
pelts, jerky movements and porcelain eyes, might look a little quaint, like
old-fashioned wind-up toys uneasily sharing the shelf with the latest video game
platforms.
At times this adaptation of Roald Dahl’s slender anti-fable — truer to the
spirit than to the letter of the source — does not even look like a movie. In
spite of the pedigreed voices (Meryl Streep and Bill Murray, along with George
Clooney in the title role), it feels more like an extended episode of what
progressive educators call imaginative play. The sets might just as well have
been built out of available household stuff, the stiff figurines animated and
ventriloquized on a classroom or bedroom floor by precocious children.
All of which may only be another way of saying that this is a Wes Anderson film.
The spirit of self-conscious juvenile playacting has informed his work from the
start, providing a theme for “Rushmore” and a sensibility for everything else.
His live-action subjects often move like stop-motion figures through landscapes
that resemble drawings and models more than real places. (Think of the cutaway
ship set in “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.”) There is a deadpan,
understated quality to his performers that also suggests puppetry, and he shows
a stubborn reluctance to let story take precedence over style.
So “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” which Mr. Anderson wrote with Noah Baumbach, and which
he has been hoping to make for many years, is in some ways his most fully
realized and satisfying film. Once you adjust to its stop-and-start rhythms and
its scruffy looks, you can appreciate its wit, its beauty and the sly gravity of
its emotional undercurrents. The work done by the animation director, Mark
Gustafson, by the director of photography, Tristan Oliver, and by the production
designer, Nelson Lowry, shows amazing ingenuity and skill, and the music (by
Alexandre Desplat, with the usual shuffle of well-chosen pop tunes, famous and
obscure) is both eccentric and just right.
Is it is a movie for children? This inevitable question depends on the
assumption that children have uniform tastes and expectations. How can that be?
And besides, the point of everything Mr. Anderson has ever done is that truth
and beauty reside in the odd, the mismatched, the idiosyncratic. He makes that
point in ways that are sometimes touching, sometimes annoying, but usually worth
arguing about. Not everyone will like “Fantastic Mr. Fox”; and if everyone did,
it would not be nearly as interesting as it is. There are some children — some
people — who will embrace it with a special, strange intensity, as if it had
been made for them alone.
Roald Dahl’s books, suspicious of authority and repelled by conformity, full of
unruly energy and wanton invention, have a similar appeal, though Dahl’s
imagination was more aggressive than Mr. Anderson’s. The director has made the
material his own by winding some of his characteristic preoccupations around the
spare, spiky architecture of the book, turning Dahl’s tale of woodland
derring-do into another melancholy, comical study of the dynamics of a loving,
difficult family.
The patriarch, old Foxy himself, is a charmer and a scapegrace, perhaps not as
floridly untrustworthy as Royal Tenenbaum, but not exactly a paragon of
responsibility either. After a few near misses — and with a newly pregnant
missus (Ms. Streep) — Mr. Fox retired from the hazardous business of poultry
killing and went into newspaper journalism. In enchanted talking-animal
fairyland, that is apparently a thriving profession, and those of us in
journalism who soon may be stealing chickens out of desperation may envy Mr. Fox
the luxury of doing it for love.
A sense of thwarted ambition — perhaps something of a vulpine midlife crisis —
sends him back into the fortified feedlots and coops of Boggis, Bunce and Bean,
the three farmers immortalized in schoolyard rhymes as “horrible crooks, so
different in looks” who are “nonetheless equally mean.” The voice of Bean, their
nasty, cider-drinking ringleader, is supplied by Michael Gambon, and their
escalating response to Mr. Fox’s raid supplies the movie with its basic
narrative engine. Will they succeed in catching Mr. Fox and his friends? Or will
he brilliantly escape their diabolical designs?
The answers to these questions are not really in doubt, and perhaps for that
reason Mr. Anderson and Mr. Baumbach often seem to lose interest in them.
Instead they delve into the social and familial relationships that define Mr.
Fox’s world, with particular attention to the rivalry between the Foxes’ only
son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), and a visiting cousin named Kristofferson (Eric
Anderson).
Kristofferson is a golden child, handsome and athletic, with the special sadness
that in Mr. Anderson’s universe, is the burden of the gifted. Ash, meanwhile, is
both jealous of his cousin and unsure of his father’s love.
