Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
Country: USA
Production Company: Twentieth Century Fox presents in association with Indian Paintbrush and Regency Enterprises an American Empirical picture
Producers: Allison Abbate, Scott Rudin, Wes Anderson, Jeremy Dawson
Executive Producers: Steven M Rales, Arnon Milchan
Director: Wes Anderson
Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, based on the book by Roald Dahl
Editors: Ralph Foster, Stephen Perkins
Cinematographer: Tristan Oliver
Music: Alexandre Desplat
Production Designer: Nelson Lowry
Visual Effects: Tim Ledbury, Liz Chan, Tom Collier/LipSync Post, Hugh Macdonald/Stranger
Character Design: Félicie Haymoz
Animation Director: Mark Gustafson/Indian Paintbrush
Puppet Fabrication: Andy Gent/Mackinnon & Saunders
Sound: David Evans, Jacob Ribicoff
Titles: Look Effects
Length: 87 mins
Budget: $40M
Cast: George Clooney (Mr Fox), Meryl Streep (Mrs Felicity Fox), Jason Schwartzman (Ash), Bill Murray (Badger), Wally Wolodarsky (Kylie), Eric Anderson (Kristofferson), Michael Gambon (Franklin Bean), Willem Dafoe (Rat), Owen Wilson (Coach Skip), Jarvis Cocker (Petey), Wes Anderson (Weasel), Karen Duffy (Linda Otter), Robin Hurlstone (Walter Boggis), Hugo Guinness (Nathan Bunce), Helen McCrory (Mrs Bean), Roman Coppola (squirrel contractor), Brian Cox (Action 12 reporter), Adrien Brody (Field Mouse), Mario Batali (Rabbit)
Synopsis: Having given up a life of chicken stealing for a less exciting career in journalism, Mr Fox decides to move his family into a desirable residence that sits dangerously close to the farms of Boggis, Bunce and Bean. Bored with his new life he decides with the help of his sidekick, Kylie the vole, to rob the farmers on successive nights, but is unprepared for the extreme measures they will take to exact revenge. Measures that will mean the loss of his tail and his home and endanger the lives of his family and the entire local animal population.
Review: There's an exciting trend in children's animation (especially if, like me, you're the father of a one-year-old) – let's call it the "Post-Pixar Approach" – that takes a more sophisticated view of story-telling and credits children with greater emotional intelligence than is the recent norm. The approach, which has nothing to do with lazy post-modern allusions to the adult world, acknowledges that many of the elements we attempt to shield our children from – pain, violence, loneliness, and frustration – actually exist and can be managed.
This can be seen in such Pixar films as WALL•E (the best depiction of solitary life in outer space since Silent Running) and Up (that staggering opening sequence), and in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (described by Mark Kermode as a kid's film as re-imagined by David Lynch) and most recently and controversially in Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. While this is entirely welcome, it does mean that the stage is set for someone to make a personal project, lose sight of the target audience and fall flat on their arse (some would argue Jonze already accomplished this).
Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox is the first book that Wes Anderson remembers owning and he worked for 10 years to get it onto the screen, first with Henry Selick (animator of Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, as well as the charming creatures in Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), who had to leave to work on Coraline and eventually with himself as director, working with an animation team in England.
When reading about Anderson's films, the words that come up most often are "hermetic" and "detailed", exemplified in his best work, Rushmore (1998) and particularly The Royal Tanenbaums (2001), the story of a dysfunctional family of prodigies in a New York brownstone, subject to the fickle whims of a dominating, miscreant patriarch. Watching Anderson's carefully art-directed snow globes – with their matching adidas gear and perfectly-spaced Futura titles (Kubrick's favorite font), it's easy to see the appeal of a world where everything must be created from scratch, moved in minute increments and that ceases to exist beyond the periphery of the lens.
Beautifully executed in the warm, walnut tones of Fall, the design and animation of the stop-motion characters in Fantastic Mr Fox is flawless – the film consists of 61,920 stills, shot on a Nikon D3 camera to give the illusion of movement – and they fit snugly into the gorgeous world created for them. Anderson wrote the movie with Noah Baumbach (co-writer of The Life Aquatic and writer-director of The Squid and the Whale) while sitting in Dahl's study at the author's home in Buckinghamshire and they lifted many details - including the Fox family's oak tree home - from what they saw around them. Even the sound recordings were made in locations as close to their natural origins as is possible – George Clooney being recorded in his garden in Italy.
However it's this insularity that is the film's main flaw. Recently the anomalies in Anderson's work are what stand out in fussy, forgettable films - Selick's animation in The Life Acquatic, the unexpected death of a child in The Darjeeling Limited - and it's easy to bemoan the collaboration with Baumbach, who created the gratingly insufferable worlds of The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding. Anderson and Baumbach consistently keep the viewer at arms length, we're outsiders looking in at a universe entirely of their creation, populated with characters whose whimsical flaws only exist to serve the plot and bear little resemblance to real people.
Here, Mr Fox speaks like George Clooney playing himself in a Woody Allen film and his son, Ash, sounds like Jason Schwartzman in Darjeeling, never quite letting you forget who's behind the animation. Bill Murray also is just too much Bill and not enough Badger, with only Meryl Streep as Felicia Fox and Willem Dafoe as Fox's nemesis, Rat letting you forget the actor and believe the character.
Anderson has said that he wanted the film itself to be like a wild animal, not overly domesticated and free of focus group feedback telling him that the farmers shouldn't smoke and the action was too violent. It's a shame then that he doesn't let rip a little more - the packed Sunday afternoon screening I attended at the Empire, Leicester Square, London was well attended by the under-10s, but they remained respectful, rather than elated - happy to enjoy the spectacle but laughing only when the animals broke character at the dinner table, becoming feral as their food is served, or at the sight of vicious guard dogs, drugged and cross-eyed, falling out of frame.
And yet, for all its faults, this is still a film I hope my daughter loves one day. Even if brain sometimes overpowers heart, its a tale of the dangers of growing up (and not growing up), the lure of domestic life versus the pull of the wild, an urban fox who wishes he was a forest wolf, and it's a good story, well told. But mostly because somewhere in my shallow heart I hope that one day she'll be smart and sassy like Kathryn Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby (or at least Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hudsucker Proxy) and because I want her to love films like this and WALL•E and My Neighbour Totoro, rather than Alvin and the Chipmunks. And, while I know that I will have to deal with whoever succeeds Miley Cyrus to the throne of Disney pop tart, I hope that some time in the future, five or six years from now, she'll watch Fantastic Mr Fox and ask me, "Daddy, what does "Kom-see, kom-sar mean?"". I'd quite like that.
Fantastic Mr Fox opened The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival on October 15th and opens in limited release in the USA on November 13th, expanding for the Thanksgiving Holiday.
Marketing display of characters and sets, The Gap, Oxford Street, London.
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