I have been saying for a while now that I only really got to see something like every other Wes Anderson movie. The ongoing pandemic has allowed me to catch up a bit on many of the ones I missed, and when I saw Disney+ dropped Isle of Dogs (one I have seen), I decided to check to see if they had Fantastic Mr. Fox (which I hadn’t).
Obviously, they did because here we are.
Done in stop-motion animation and based on a book by Roald Dahl, Fantastic Mr. Fox tells the story of Mr. Fox (George Clooney), retired chicken thief who desires more out of life. After his wife Felicity (Meryl Streep) tells him she is pregnant and tired of the near-death they experience when they try to capture some chickens, Fox retires from that life to become a newspaper columnist. He lives in a hole with his cranky, clumsy son Ash (Jason Schwartzman), but he wants more. After moving into a hollow tree, he notes that there are three poultry farms nearby, each run by a different, fox-hating farmer with his own tics. Steeling from each of these farms would be a real feather in Fox’s cap so long as he can pull it off without getting caught by either the farmers or Felicity. He has his friend Kyle the possum, his wife’s agile (if reluctant) nephew, and maybe his interested (if generally inept) son for help. Too bad the farmers don’t take kindly to being robbed.
There’s a nice, quirky animation style to this movie, but that fits given this is very much what an animated Wes Anderson movie would look like (with a script co-written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach). Mr. Fox’s sartorial choices wouldn’t look out of place in any other Anderson movie, and the same is more or less true of the other characters. The sets all have that symmetrical look of any of Anderson’s other movies, and quite frankly, I suspect Anderson may have the most symmetrical shot composition since Stanley Kubrick if not greater. The difference is Anderson’s seem to create a warm sense of melancholic nostalgia whereas Kubrick’s were just meant to create emotional distance.
However, at the center there is a story, and it’s a very Wes Anderson story, is a character, in this case Mr. Fox, who wants something and while he may not get what it is he thinks he’s looking for, he’ll end up with something much better in the end that probably never occurred to him in the first place. These aren’t really emotional characters because, well, Anderson’s characters aren’t overly emotional. They certainly feel, but they don’t demonstrate feeling. Ultimately, Mr. Fox learns a lesson, vanquishes his enemies (so to speak), and finds a way to both have a safe place to live while also having a place to rob to scratch that particular itch. And really, this is Wes Anderson’s work. There’s a consistent level of quality to everything the man does, so if you like his work, you should like this. If you don’t, you won’t. Me? I generally like, but rarely love, what he does.
Grade: B+
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