Certificate: PG
Running time: 87 mins
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: George
Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman
Genre: Animation,
Family
Country: USA
In preparation for the return of Wes Anderson and The Grand Budapest Hotel we thought it might be nice to have a look
back over a few of his cinematic offerings.
With that in mind, and throwing a devil may care attitude towards demands
for chronology we take a look at Anderson’s big screen adaptation of the Roald
Dahl classic Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Mr. Fox (George Clooney) is a thief, a conman and a maker of enemies everywhere
there’s a farmer that is until he decides to retire and do something else. Four human years later, happily married to
Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) and with child, Ash, he finds the old instincts taking
over again and the undeniable attraction of life outside the law, but when he takes matters too far and his
three main foes lay siege to his house what transpires is a high prize chess
game of life and death.
I love Wes Anderson.
He’s an incredible director, with an amazing eye for detail and has a
way of taking a narrative that one might know inside out and retelling it to
you in such a way that it’s new, exciting, and invigorating. What you get with a Wes Anderson helmed Roald
Dahl adaptation is not necessarily the by-the-book narrative that fans of the
story will expect but more a Kubrickian approach to adaptations. Famously, the great Stanley had a system of reading the book due
for adaptation once (without making notes) and then writing a first draft of
the script; the logic being that the important details will stick while the
rest will fall to the wayside. This was
the largest onion in the ointment for Stephen King when Kubrick took on (or was it took
over?) The Shining and created a
screen adaptation far superior to anything King has or will ever accomplish
while he insists on creative control.
Much like Kubrick, Anderson
has taken the essential elements of the Dahl fable and peppered the gaps with
quintessential Wes moments which only add further evidence that we are watching
a great modern day auteur at work.
The narrative for Fantastic Mr.
Fox is a wonderful mix of traditional and modern-quirky but even the Andersonisms
have the familiar sense of fun and adventure that Dahl always managed to infuse
into his work. The sculpting of the
narrative arches in order to transforms FMF
into a heist movie en par with The
Hot Rock, Ocean’s 11 (1960 &
2001) and Out of Sight is
phenomenal. The best animated movies
manage to craft a story that appeals to adults and children alike, yet what Anderson manages here is
to sculpt a story that is not just compelling to multiple generations but is
also funny to multiple generations at the same time for different reasons. It’s truly beyond impressive.
Visually the film is incredible.
The decision to forgo the sterile perfection of CGI for stop-motion
animation stylings in not only admirable, it’s downright genius. There’s a richness to Mr. Fox’s visual palette that is alluring, the attention to detail
connotes a love in the creation of the project that invites the audience
in. It makes an emotional connection through it’s construction in the same way Dahl’s text and illustrations have
and as such is an extension of the source material rather than a
bastardisation. Many of the techniques
deployed in the movie have been evolved over the history of cinema, and come to
fruition in Anderson ’s
skill set via earlier offerings, The Life
Aquatic for example. It is the
stop-motion of Ray Harryhausen, of Jason
and the Argonauts, of Clash of the
Titans, and is a much more inclusive and welcoming visual signature than
that of modern-day animation, much as we love Pixar. It also bonds one generation to another. Today’s children, quite possibly, have not
seen animation of this style before. To
them this is an entirely new,
groundbreaking, eye-opening method of storytelling which brings them full
circle to be on a level of experience that was felt by the parents,
grandparents the first time they encountered animations.
As you would expect from Wes Anderson, the cast is studded with star. George Clooney gives a commanding vocal
performance that’s a mix of Jack Foley (Out
of Sight) and Ulysses Everett Magill (O
Brother Where Art Thou?) which offers a blend of the traditional and the
quirky that compliments the Wes Anderson approach to storytelling. It’s a surprisingly emotive performance that
carries several moments of heartfelt sorry, joy, excitement which will (no
doubt) see him return to Planet Anderson at some point during the next few
years. Meryl Streep (as Mrs. Fox) is
another newcomer to the Anderson
family band and is almost unrecognisable.
Unfortunately for her, the film is called Fantastic Mr. Fox and as such there’s not a great deal for the
Oscar Collector to really dig into and make her own. She does, however, have great chemistry not
just with Clooney but Schwartzman (Ash) who is incredible, off kilter and
complex as ever…even without physical form.
Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Michael Gambon and Owen Wilson round out an
army of familiar Anderson
faces (or voices) and all help to construct the world of Mr. Fox.
It truly
is incredible how complete this animated land of chicken heists and psychotic
farmer’s actually is. Credit is required
for all involved in helping to layer this multi-faceted land to a degree that
most live action movies would fail to accomplish. Put simply, Fantastic
Mr. Fox is a film that no other director working in cinema today could
make. It has an attention to detail,
level of love and rounded sense of fun, mania and narrative depth that is
rarely found in one piece of cinema and simultaneously a Wes Anderson film and a Roald Dahl legacy.
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