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Friday, December 11, 2009
Fantastic Mr. Fox is, well, Fantastic
It’s one of the best animated films of the year, and, these days, that means its one of the best films, period.
Wes Anderson directed this Roald Dahl classic, with the Fox and his wife being voiced by George Clooney and Meryl Streep (IMDB listing). It uses stop-motion animation that’s deliberately just a tad jerky, which is just fine and dandy. A wide-ranging palette, mostly saturated, leaning toward warm tones. Nice fur textures, nice teeth, too. I particularly like the plan views where you see a cross-section of the local topography with all the fox tunnels underground in relation to things above ground. A nice touch, juxtaposed against teeth-baring close-ups. That is to say, a pleasing range of imagery.
The story? Family stuff. He and she, get caught, get married, years later he’s settled down (columnist for the local paper), they have a kid, somewhat of an oddball, and a cousin comes visiting. Conflict within the family. Conflict between the foxes and the humans, and then all the animals vs. the humans. Could even be Nature vs. Culture, entirely within foxdom.
Here’s what NYC animator Michael Sporn says:
When I saw all the advance bits and pieces of The Fantastic Mr. Fox, I hated what I saw. I could imagine only negatives. The more I saw, however, the more I was being won over by the voice cast. When I saw the film, I loved it. I mean, I LOVED it. I’m looking forward to seeing it again . . . and again. Wes Anderson pulled together a brilliant film full of charm and wit and intelligence. It not only was one of my favorite animated films of the year, it was one of my favorite films . . . period.
Go see it. Now.
Comments
Let a thousand flowers bloom, and so on and so forth:
I found this more charming than I had anticipated. Lily said: ‘it’s good, but why did they have to different-it from the book?’ A good question, actually.
There’s something distantly unnerving about the way all the native English animals are deadpanning wisecracking Americans, but the humans all have English accents. Plus, looking back on a slight but pronounced sense of nark I felt whilst watching it, I realise that I’ve been innoculated against the fiction that a feckless, con-man, charismatic, fantasist Dad can ever be, in any way, a good thing from the kids’ point of view by reading, oh I don’t know, just about every story about such a character, from John Le Carré on. This film, by peddling its ‘fantastic’ angle straight, and getting George Clooney to purr the lines in his best come-on voice, ends up in a pretty solidly mendacious place, actually. Which is a shame, because a Willy Loman take on the ‘fantastic’ element of the title might have made a more interesting picture.
Other than that: it’s visually very attractive indeed. Some of the left-field humour is nicely done; I liked Kylie the Oppossum, and especially his swirly eye moments; and I laughed at the Jarvis Cocker onscreen rebuke. Then again, I have a high tolerance for left-field humour. And, actually, only about a tenth of this film’s field is left. A quarter is way over to the right (the poisonous pseudo-babble about how being ‘different’ is good, ‘different’ here meaning ‘mildly eccentric mannerisms’; the reactionary class narrative inherent in this fable of a bunch of lawyers, pediatricians, landscape painters and journalists as the victims, no really, of three farmers with grating, parvenu-y, estuary accents—or the wincing, self-serving material about how these bourgeois popinjays actually embody a ‘wild animal’ nature). But the rest—what is that, 65%?—is solidly in the middle, and neither offensive nor brilliant, merely entertaining.
Note, Adam, that Kylie isn’t the only one with occasionally swirly eyes. He may have gone swirle most often, but other characters did it, too. Mr. Fox, in particular, near the end, though I forget the exact context.
Interesting observations about class, and wildness too. The implication is certainly that “wildness” is somehow a desireable quality, and that those farmers don’t have it, despite their escalation of violence in protection of their hard-earned foodstuffs-for-sale through all technical means available.
And then there’s the well-tailored clothes of our animals. Interesting stuff.