Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
12/7/09
Love him or hate him, no
one can dispute that director Wes Anderson has created a filmmaking style
all his own. Oh, sure, others can try to infuse the American Independent
style with the same level of comic manic depression he does, but good lucky
trying to catch up, or to walk the tightrope that allows him to almost
always stay on the fun side of despair (don't get me started on The
Darjeeling Limited, the exception to this rule). I'm also partial
to the occasions when he mixes in other genres, like the action adventure
bent of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and you'd be hard-pressed
to see any director take a more outside-the-box genre leap than the one
Anderson takes with Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stop-motion animated family
film in the style of the old Rankin/Bass TV specials. As far as it
is from the likes of The Royal Tenenbaums, Mr. Fox is unmistakably
Anderson's, and in fact its' mixture of childlike whimsy and philosophical
profundity makes it a strong contender for the best movie he's ever done.
Delightfully quirky, it's got enough critter hijinks to entertain the kids,
but it's really designed for the adults who grew up on old school stop
motion. No doubt, as with the entire Wes Anderson catalog, the more
adventurous the viewer, the better.
Years ago, chicken-stealing
adventurer Mr. Fox (voice of George Clooney) gave up his life of daring-do
to settle down with Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) and raise their child, Ash
(Jason Schwartzman). Mr. Fox now writes a newspaper column with no
apparent readers and is growing increasingly stir crazy in the family hole.
His first idea to alleviate his mid-life crisis: move the family
from a hole to a tree. And so they do, with the help of attorney
Badger (Bill Murray) and handyman Kylie (Wallace Wolodarsky). The
newly above-ground Fox family welcomes visiting cousin Kristofferson (Eric
Chase Anderson), who drives Ash crazy by being better at everything than
he is. But the new digs just aren't enough, and Mr. Fox plans One
Last Job, raiding a local farm with Kylie's help and stealing a precious
chicken. It goes so well, he plans a second Last Job, and soon has
struck the farms of all three of the meanest farmers known to man, Boggis
(Robin Hurlstone), Bunce (Hugo Guinness) and Bean (Michael Gambon).
These are not men to be taken lightly; in fact, they're so mean the local
kids sing a nursery rhyme about it. And once they've caught Mr. Fox's
scent, they track him back to the family tree and dig it right out of the
ground. Good thing Foxes can dig too, and the family escapes by burrowing
underground, but the farmers throw all their efforts into an all-out assault
on the animal kingdom, digging deeper and deeper trying to catch the fox
who robbed their farms. In the process, every animal in the neighborhood
becomes a fugitive. As the siege grows more and more desperate, Mr.
Fox will need to call upon all the animals' special talents if they're
to have any hope of survival.
Fantastic Mr. Fox
is the latest of Roald Dahl's many beloved children's novels to be adapted
to the big screen. Like most of them, it's more than a little trippy,
which suits Anderson just fine. Onto Dahl's timeless tale of class
struggle between the farmers who have everything and the animals who must
steal to eat, he grafts his own perennial concerns about finding one's
place in the world, but also finds plenty of fascinating grist for his
mill in the kid-lit juxtaposition of human traits onto animals we tend
to take for granted. Fantastic Mr. Fox's critters are very
much animals in suits, using the trappings of human life to civilize away
their baser instincts, but those desires to claw and snarl are never far
from the surface. Those repressed animal instincts make a great metaphor
for the festering goals and desires that lurk beneath our own day-to-day
lives, as we're all really just animals in suits. And the story's
boatload of conflict also allows for some truly poetic musing about the
futility of so many of our battles, when we all have a limited time in
this world. The death scene of Mr. Fox's arch-nemesis Weasel (Willem
Dafoe) is particularly poignant.
But it's not all high-mindedness:
Fantastic Mr. Fox is a lot of fun thanks to its' nifty animation
and really awesome voice cast. Clooney is at the top of his Movie
Star game, while Streep does quite a bit of acting from behind the Mrs.
Fox puppet. Gambon is a sensationally ruthless adversary, embodying
everything Mean Old Men in children's books stand for. I run hot
and cold on Schwartzman's patented sad sack routine, but here it works
beautifully, and the pouty Ash puppet couldn't make angst any funnier.
Wolodarsky is a delight as the mole who's always running a little bit behind
what Mr. Fox is saying. Jarvis Cocker plays the inevitable Indie
Troubadour, with the fun extra touches that he's working for the bad guys
and that his big number makes clever fun of the way Indie Troubadour songs
seem to be made up as they're sung.
As I've mentioned, the puppets
themselves are wonderful, and the animation team not only captures the
odd lifelike qualities present in the best of this sort of stop-motion
animation (I love the way the animals' fur always seems to be blowing in
some sort of breeze), but surpasses anything you've seen before in shots
like one that stands Mr. and Mrs. Fox in front of a waterfall of real water,
one of the most beautiful images I've seen all year. There's a great
deal of visual invention in the art direction (far more, even, if you're
a big Dahl fan: the Fox's tree is based upon one on his property
and its' interior is a replica of the garden hut where he wrote), and Alexandre
Desplat's score is an absolute delight, built around that nursery rhyme
Dahl created for the book.
Unlike most animated features,
where each actor records his role separately in a recording studio, Anderson
assembled his entire cast (sans Streep, who had to work alone because of
a scheduling conflict) in areas acoustically appropriate to the locations
in the movie, and he gets a big payoff in the form of some of the most
lived-in vocal work I've ever head in an animated movie. And there's
a real improvisational air to the proceedings (the animation was changed
to accommodate any stray sounds the mics picked up) even beyond the random
silliness build into Anderson and Noah Baumbach's outstanding script.
There's been much talk leading
up to Fantastic Mr. Fox's release about the notion that it's a movie
without a target audience. I can't really argue with that, except
to say that people who like really good movies shouldn't be scared away
by something this adventurous. Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of
the best movies of the year, a must-see for Wes Anderson fans, Rankin-Bass
enthusiasts, and anybody else whose inner chicken thief is just begging
to get out.
P.S. If you're wondering
what the heck the MPAA could possibly mean by “slang humor”, I believe
it's Anderson and Baumbach's clever idea to use the word “cuss” in place
of all potential profanity, as in “what the cuss”. That vaguely worded
warning is in place for anyone who might find that offensive <COUGHWEIRDOCOUGH>. |
