The fantastic Mr Fox
Directed by Wes Anderson
Written by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach
George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Eric Anderson and Michael Gambon
Wes Anderson is a filmmaker with whom I have a conflicted relationship. On the one hand he is responsible for some of the smartest, most quietly haunting films of the last fifteen years (namely Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums), but he has also created an aesthetic that has single-handedly ruined ‘indie’ cinema and has spurned on us the cutesy, hipster-baiting, hand-drawn credit sequenced likes of Juno, Napoleon Dynamite and Garden State. Anderson’s own post Tenenbaums output has sometimes become so caught up in its thoroughly detailed, painfully tasteful art direction that it has become cold, sterile, funny but entirely soulless recreations of his past work (see Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and sections of The Darjeeling Limited). So the news that he would foray into stop-motion animation to recreate Roald Dahl’s classic book on the screen, put me in a hopeful mood. Perhaps, adapting someone else’s work for the first time (and that someone being a writer with as defined a style as Anderson, himself), and working in a new medium could free Anderson up and bring a new phase to his filmography.
Fantastic Mr. Fox isn’t quite the departure I was hoping for, it is instead a marriage of both Dahl’s and Anderson’s sensibilities. The greatest surprise here is that it works. The film still features certain trademarks (centred framing, dysfunctional families, well meaning yet narcissistic lead, hip soundtrack), but it manages to create a sense of warmth and unforced feeling that both Zissou and Darjeeling sorely lacked. The new film seems to be entirely weightless, as Anderson and co-scripter Noah Baumbach add humanity and wit to Dahl’s relatively simple story of a fox getting his revenge on three particularly unsavoury farmers. This is particularly clear in the decision to meld all the fox children into one character, Ash, voiced superbly by Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman, whose athletic ineptitude, bad temper and difficult relationship with his parents become the emotional centre of the film. George Clooney and Meryl Streep as Mr. and Mrs. Fox, respectively, acquit themselves nicely in Anderson’s world and represent the only new additions to the cast, made up entirely of cast members from the director’s previous films. Much of Fox is reminiscent of past works, its central crux is the family dynamic and the often prickly relations between children and their parents, something both Anderson and Baumbach have delved into many times before, and while this film doesn’t mine entirely new territory it manages to be affecting and enjoyable nonetheless. Perhaps, most winning about the entire affair is how Anderson smartly adjusts his style to a children’s movie, and manages to create a warm engaging film for kids while still holding doggedly to his singular style. With Spike Jonze also diving into kid’s movie territory with Where the Wild Things Are later this year, and Pixar continuing to blur the line between animation and arthouse, it would seem that Fantastic Mr. Fox is a harbinger of things to come, where the standard mindless family-friendly fare is thrown out for a new auteur-driven, thoughtful and intelligent children’s movie. At least, I hope so.
Comments
No comments yet. Use the form above to have your say.
