Film Review: Fantastic Mr Fox

Wes Anderson seems to polarise audiences. There are those die-hard fans who worship at the altar of Rushmore, while others (many of whom enjoyed Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums) can no longer stand Anderson’s particular brand of quirk: his increasingly wealthy, bizarre and entirely dysfunctional characters who no longer remotely resonate with reality.

So, what better way to win over both factions than to ditch reality altogether and take up with Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox? The result is indeed fantastical. Anderson fleshes out Dahl’s slender novel about a sly fox stealing from three grouchy, gun-toting farmers, creating a wonderful, intricate and yes, quirky world that charms and delights.

George Clooney and Meryl Streep take the foxy leads of an impressive ensemble cast alongside Anderson stalwarts Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson (Clooney and Streep must work together again, what a fabulous pairing!). And though American accents abound, there is a nod to the story’s English origins with the Michael Gambon lending his rounded tones to the malevolent farmer Franklin Bean.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is also distinctly aware of its cinematic origins, with Wallace & Gromit clearly in the mind of Anderson and his crew of patient craftsmen. The painstaking requirements of stop-motion filmmaking can’t be for the faint of heart, but is a perfect world for Anderson. Here his heightened, stylish, orangey aesthetic augments the story, rather than distracting from it. Thinking back to cross-section boat from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Fantastic Mr. Fox feels like the logical, wonderful conclusion of Anderson’s playful eye.

So too does the story work to his idiosyncratic ends. Like Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a more adult adaptation of a children’s book; it’s humor ironic, with that special brand of Anderson zany. Yet fortunately – and unlike Jonze – Anderson manages to keep the whimsy and the audacity of Fox’s adventure, so even where some family rivalry plot points drag, there is still the spirited caper and an in-his-element Clooney to have fun with.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is all about embracing your true nature, and with this film Anderson has done just that (it appears both he and Jonze want to celebrate their inner ‘wild thing’). So while going wild is a little incongruous given how domesticated and snappily dressed all the animals are, it still makes for a cussing good time at the cinema.

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