While still short of the decade-old high water mark of Rushmore, Fantastic Mr. Fox is Wes Anderson’s first film since that one impossible to dismiss as “flawed” — a good thing, because when you’re as poised and elegant a filmmaker as Anderson, you can only have so many interesting failures under your belt before you start to tip over. Put simply, the movie works: if absolute control over his actors and the physical environment is what Anderson needs to deliver as pitch-perfect a comedy as this, then he should make only animated films from here on out. (OK, that’s a bit unfair: I did miss the human element a little, especially since Anderson seemed to be allowing it more breathing room on his last, underrated feature, The Darjeeling Limited.) From the gorgeous autumnal backgrounds to the clever, uncloying characterizations to the lively musical score (handled this time by Alexandre Desplat, who cooks up something one part Mothersbaugh, one part Morricone, and one part Wicker Man), Fantastic Mr. Fox is a highly crafted entertainment that embraces what Anderson does best while avoiding the arty longueurs that have bogged down his recent films.
But, true to the founding father of the talking fox genre (Jean de La Fontaine), Anderson’s expert whimsy also does service as allegory: Mr. Fox can be thought of as the leader of a terrorist cell, or a politician heading down the road of mutually assured destruction, or even as an avatar of the director himself, a desperate-to-impress neurotic disguised as a devil-may-care, daredevil aesthete. The result is a movie emotionally complex enough to give the children who (hopefully) will be awed by its visuals something to aspire to in their repeat viewings. I wish this had come out when I was a kid.
by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
27 Nov 2009 9:00 PM | Comments (5)
You beat me to it: I saw this with my mom (yes, that’s right) and a theater full of surprisingly well-behaved children only yesterday.
I quite agree that animation suits Anderson’s desire for total control over actors and physical environment. But I’d even get a bit more specific: animation suits his consuming passion for textures. Anderson is one of the great manipulators of the screen’s surface, not only in his predilection for cramming the frame with detail, but also in the way he plays with flat compositions, focal depth, and proscenium framing. In live-action drama, where depth and naturalism are the supposed ideals, these recurrent motifs can make Anderson seem superficial and fussy at the expense of character and psychology. But in stop-motion animation, these formal devices are sort of the point. Visual pleasure derives from the tactile familiarity of what’s onscreen and the slightly uncanny sense of scale.
This must be why those children were so well-behaved: they were pondering the same questions of animation and phenomenology.
Aww, a “Mommy & Me” screening. That’s adorable.
I agree with you about the textures. It’s funny, when I first saw clips from the film in trailers and commercials (which were reportedly edited, for the first time ever, by the studio and not by Anderson), I didn’t think the animation looked good at all, and I think this was because they were cut at the usual pace of advertisements for comedies or kids’ movies: that is, hyper-ultra-super-fast. But the brilliant thing about the movie is the way it keeps slowing itself down (though of course sometimes it’s fast too), letting you examine the compositions and constructions at your leisure. There were lots of moments where I took a little mental break from the story and just started looking at objects on the shelves, or the physiognomy of some character in the background. But rather than coming off fussy or overdone or offputtingly “perfect,” as sometimes in WA’s other films, here the texturedness somehow enhances the audience’s childlike desire for malleability, or tactility. As Dana Stevens of Slate says, it’s less like a picture you look at and more like a doll house you want to climb inside.
I have a feeling I just said the exact same thing you did, but at greater length. But I guess that’s what phenomenology is all about.
I feel a strange compulsion to pet that fuzzy fox fur.
That’s the headline on Ebert’s blog, so I guess he agrees, albeit in a more perverse-sounding way.
I think that’s a line from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
Thank you for singling out the musical score. I didn’t know the composer was Desplat. I loved Desplat’s music for “The Painted Veil” — did he get nominated for an Oscar for that? He should have been. It was so evocative.
Leo
28 November 2009
3:38 PM
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