Film: Fantastic Mr Fox
To put it simply, Fantastic Mr Fox is as fantastic as his name arrogantly announces.
Initially a side project to feed Wes Anderson’s fascination with the Roald Dahl book, the stop-motion film took 2 years to make and is very charming indeed.
A few of Anderson’s motifs are peppered throughout, the use of Futura Bold font (a nod to his main influence, Stanley Kubrick) as well as the use of certain actors – namely Bill Murray (The Life Aquatic, The Royal Tenenbaums as the brilliant Badger), Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore, The Darjeeling Limited as sweet, inexperienced Ash Fox) and Owen Wilson (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic in a small role as Coach Skip the ferret). Along with this, some genius casting took place in the way of George Clooney as the title’s character and Meryl Streep as the long-suffering wife.
If you know the book well, you’ll only recognise the very foundations of the story in this film – the talking animals, the three evil farmers (Boggis, Bunce and Bean, one fat, one short, one lean…), their strange eating habits (goose liver pate infused doughnuts anyone?) and Mr Fox’s emasculating tail removal.
The film opens with Mr and Mrs Fox deciding to stop stealing chickens after narrowly escaping death but the crafty devil that is Mr Fox decides to embark on ‘one last excursion’ with the brilliant Kylie, the absent-minded Possum (Wallace Wolodarsky)! But one final excursion leads to another and the farmers he steals from get quite rightly pissed about it. Mr Fox’s attempts to be wild once more jeopardises the lives of all the animals as the farmers go to increasingly extreme lengths to get their revenge.
A few words need to be said about the film’s soundtrack. An endearing score mastered by Alexandre Desplat combined with classic pop songs by the Beach Boys and Rolling Stones to give it that cutesy edge and it’s yet another Anderson motif (consider the use of Nico, Elliott Smith and The Rolling Stones in The Royal Tenenbaums). Though one cannot forget a song about the title character written by Jarvis Cocker, who has a small role as one of the farmer’s lackeys, Petey. Speaking of the farmers, I really felt Mr Anderson brought them to life; the disturbingly lanky Bunce, the convex Boggis but I especially loved psychotic Bean, voiced by the extraordinary Michael Gambon. He was genuinely terrifying in parts throwing popstar tantrums even FiX’s editor Jo Stashko would be ashamed of, after being foiled by Mr Fox countless times.
Overall, the film’s worth a look if you could use cheering up in this shoddy autumn weather. Fantastic Mr Fox has been on general release since October 23rd.
Kate Preston
