Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)

I've always felt that Wes Anderson is the sort of director whose films I really ought to love - they're smart and odd - both qualities I possess, or aspire to. He takes casts of actors I adore and gives them lots of time to breathe in low-key, interesting roles. Best of all, he doesn't seem to feel the need to idiot-proof his work, which means he's able to skip the clumsy exposition and brutally manipulative soundtracking that puts me off so many otherwise blameless films. Like I say, I should love them.

I don't, though, for the most part, much to my private shame. I admire the likes of The Royal Tenenbaums  and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, admire the heck out of them, in fact, but it's not the same thing. I admire them like an exquisite china figurine, in that I'm dazzled and charmed by their beauty and delicacy and rich colours, but you wouldn't want to take a piece of Wedgewood or Royal Doulton in your arms and hold it close to your heart, would you?

All of that changed, however, in 2009, with the release of Anderson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's story Fantastic Mr. Fox. I was curious about this one from the moment I heard it was in production, but cautiously so - how would such a mannered director cope with Dahl's notably rumbustious characters and storylines? More to the point, how was he physically going to recreate a book about talking animals? Oh. Stop motion animation? Now I began to see how it all might fit together.

In case anybody reading this had a deprived childhood, both the literary and cinematic versions of Fantastic Mr. Fox relate the adventures of the titular character, a singular individual who can't quite resist the lure of local farmers' livestock despite despite being ostensibly settled down with a wife and family. When he starts raiding the poultry sheds of Messrs. Boggis, Bunce and Bean, however, he soon realizes he could lose far more than he ever intended...

The good

I know that as a grown-up, sensible film critic I'm not supposed to admit to having favourite films. Nevertheless, Fantastic Mr. Fox is my favourite. That's favourite singular, the one movie I absolutely, definitively love more than any other film I've seen in my life so far. Every single frame is a beautiful, miniaturized work of art, while vocal work is done by a mixture of stars and relative unknowns who deliver Anderson's stilted, stylized lines in a naturalistic way that makes the characters sound just as confused and screwed up as everybody else in the world.

Did I mention that I love this film?

Unfortunately, I love it so much it's hard to know where to start highlighting the good parts - every time I watch, I land up cracking a huge sentimental grin about once every thirty seconds or so. I think it's the way the slight jerkiness of the stop-motion echoes the characters' inability to articulate their own feelings; there's a disconnect between what they want to express and what actually comes out, and I'm sure we've all felt like this at various points in our life. Heck, maybe it's this that gives the film the heart I've always felt Anderson's films have rather lacked.

It hasn't hurt, of course, that the cast number some of Hollywood's most eminently loveable performers. Step forward George Clooney, of course, but huge credit also has to go to Meryl Streep, whose Mrs. Fox provides the film's moral compass. My personal favourite, however, was my perpetual personal favourite Jason Schwartzman, playing sulky tweenager Ash as a gleeful portrait of quite how awful kids can be at that age and a reminder of how not all sensitive outsiders are beautiful on the inside.

At its core, however, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a film about being true to oneself. Granted, this is a common enough message, but it's usually presented in a rather more simplistic way: you're perfect the way you are, so don't try to hide it. Fox, on the other hand, offers a more interesting take, something more like you probably can't change your inner self but it'll probably get you into trouble sooner or later, so if you really feel the need to express it, for cuss' sake be sneaky about it. 

The bad

I'm really loath to criticise this one, but unfortunately it does fall into a couple of common traps that need addressing, both of which are so common I've long grown sick of thinking and writing about them.

First off, I can understand the desire to cast Michael Gambon as your main villain. Let's face it, nobody gives better villain than Gambon, and his performance here is as slickly spiteful as anything he's done since The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Unfortunately, he's the antagonist to a group of protagonists with exclusively American accents, and we're back to that tired old perfidious Albion trope that really should have died out a good couple of decades ago.

There's also the question of the film's female characters - they're relatively few in number compared to the males, and they're all in such conventional roles. There's the loving mother, the dedicated paediatrician, the secretary and the accountant in their smart office gear, and none of them have even the tiniest spark of mischief or malice about them. This is a film that actively embraces the flaws in human nature (animal nature?) but with the exception of Bean's one-joke myopic wife, the female characters are all patient, maternal and endlessly but wearily tolerant of the little boys of all ages that inhabit their lives.

The verdict

I kind of wish I hadn't written about this one today, if only because by acknowledging its flaws for the first time I'm going to find them harder to ignore on subsequent viewings. Still, this is a beautiful, unusual piece of filmmaking, and one that I can (almost) wholeheartedly recommend.