Movie Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox

By A.O. SCOTT THE NEW YORK TIMES

Fantastic Mr. Fox, filmed in stop-motion animation, opens today.

ADVERSTISMENT

LITTLE ROCK — Fantastic Mr. Fox is a proudly analog entertainment, making its handmade way into a marketplace glutted with digital goodies. Next to the 3-D, computer-generated creatures who swoop and soar off the screen these days, these furry talking animals, with their matted pelts, jerky movements and porcelain eyes, look a little quaint, like old-fashioned windup toys uneasily sharing the shelf with the latest video game platforms.

At times this adaptation of Roald Dahl’s slender antifable - truer to the spirit than to the letter of the source - does not even look like a movie.

Movie

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Rating: PG

Length: 1 hour, 27 minutes

More information

In spite of the pedigreed voices (Meryl Streep and Bill Murray, along with George Clooney in the title role),it feels more like an episode of what progressive educators call imaginative play. The sets may as well have been built of household stuff, the stiff figurines animated and ventriloquized on the 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. 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 Anderson scripted with Noah Baumbach, and which he has been hoping to make for many years, is in some ways his most satisfying film. Once you adjust to its stop-and-start rhythms and its scruffy looks, you can appreciate its wit, beauty and the sly gravity of its emotional undercurrents.

The work done by animation director Mark Gustafson, director of photography Tristan Oliver and production designer Nelson Lowry shows amazing ingenuity and skill. The music (by Alexandre Desplat, with the usual shuffle of well-chosen pop tunes, famous and obscure) is 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.

And besides, the point of everything 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.

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, full of unruly energy and wanton invention, have a similar appeal, although Dahl’s imagination was more aggressive than Anderson’s. The director has made the material his own by winding some of his characteristic preoccupations around the spiky architecture of the book, turning Dahl’s tale of derring-do into another melancholy, comical study of the dynamics of a loving, difficult family.

After a few near misses - and with a newly pregnant missus (Streep) - Fox retired from the hazardous business of poultry killing and went into journalism.

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 Fox’s raid supplies the movie with its basic narrative engine.Will they succeed in catching Fox and friends?

The answers to these questions are not really in doubt, and Anderson and Baumbach often seem to lose interest in them. Instead they delve into the social and familial relationships that define 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 Anderson’s universe, is the burden of the gifted. Ash, meanwhile, is 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. .

Which maybe this isn’t after all. But at the same time it is precisely the movie that a child smitten with 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.

MovieStyle, Pages 34 on 11/27/2009

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