November 13, 2009
Don’t Count Your Chickens
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: November 13, 2009
“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.
And the father manages, in his charming way, to endanger the lives of everyone dear to him — not only his family, but also friends, like Badger (Mr. Murray) and Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky), a mole who becomes Fox’s accomplice. Fox’s recklessness is part of his magnetic appeal, of course, but it also strains his marriage and shadows him with an ethical ambiguity unusual in a children’s movie.
Which maybe this isn’t after all. (There is one scene, in which a character dies a violent death, that may be too chilling for some younger viewers to handle.) But at the same time it is precisely the movie that a child smitten with Roald Dahl’s fiction and fascinated by the enigmas of the adult world would dream of making: something to amaze and terrify the grown-ups and win the envy and adulation of his peers.
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