This Fox Really Is Fantastic!

This has been a banner year for animation, with Upand Coralineleading the way, and smaller fare like A Town Called Panic boldly carving their own unique niches.  Now, opening this past weekend in New York & L.A. and across the country on Thanksgiving Day comes an adaptation of a Roald Dahl story from quirkmeister Wes Anderson that continues the cinematic excellence, but approaches it from a somewhat different angle.  The Fantastic Mr Fox is definitely one of the more unique animated films ever released by major studio.  As anyone who's seen the trailers can attest, this is old school stop motion animation, but not the smooth Nightmare Before Christmas type of stop motion or even the wildly entertaining Wallace and Gromit claymation look.  No, this is something akin to the hand-movedRankin Bass Christmas specials, with the cuteness extracted and replaced with coolness, and a little bit of edginess.  It's actually very refreshing to see an animated film that isn't constantly trying to wow it's audience with spectacular visuals; animation is used here simply because it's the best medium for telling this story.  The focus, as with all great animation, lies in a compelling story and engaging characters.  ( I hope Mr. Zemeckis is taking notes.)  The original Dahl story focuses on a fox doing what comes natural and stealing from three local farmers.  The farmers become obsessive in capturing the fox and practically destroy their farms in the attempt.  It's a fairly simple story, as children's books often have, but also has a generous helping of wit, sarcasm and sly humor like Roald Dahl children's stories have.  Wes Anderson has chosen to add a prologue and big finale to the story and changed Mr Foxes' family around a bit, but the story arc and characterizations stay true to Dahl's original.  The voice work hits every note flawlessly with George Clooney as Mr Fox and Jason Schwartzman as his son Ash being the stand-outs, and a nice cameo by Willem Defoe as Rat.  The whole film is just too much fun not to enjoy.

The aforementioned prologue has Mr Fox deciding to settle down, giving up his life of stealing chickens and sneaking around when Mrs Fox informs him that she is pregnant as they are about to be caught.  We skip ahead several years to see a domesticated Mr Fox working as a writer, but obviously lusting for some of his old life.  He moves his family from the underground den where they've been living into a tree overlooking the farms of Bean, Boggis & Bunce.  His early teenage (or whatever the equivalent is in fox years) son, Ash subscribes to the "nobody gets me" malaise that many of Anderson's characters carry around combined with a strong desire to impress his father.  Then Kristofferson (Ash's cousin) comes to visit due to his father's illness and Kristofferson is every bit the athlete that Ash isn't.  The Ash and Kristofferson characters are Anderson's greatest addition to Dahl's story, spicing things up internally with a rivalry/admiration angle that I'm sure many tweens & early teens watching can easily relate to.  To top it off, this addition never gets in the way of the main story, instead enhancing it and taking it in places Dahl hadn't though of, providing a much wider emotional range than the source material.  It's truly amazing how effortlessly Anderson weaves the teen angst angle in with the main story and makes so many other "adult" observations (male mid-life wanderlust, etc) throughout without ever detracting from the fun of the whole wonderfully ridiculous plot.  I really don't want to go into the story in any more detail because this is a film to be experienced, and if you just want to know what happens, without experiencing how we get there, you won't enjoy this film anyway.  This is one of those rare films that only Pixar seems able to come up with lately that can appeal to the entire family on different levels, and not feel like a total unsatisfying mishmash: no 3-D, no photo-realistic CGI, no completely inappropriate chase scenes, no pop culture references and fart jokes, no characters obviously put in to sell toys, just damn good story telling... that happens to be animated.