Fantastic Mr Fox
Film: Fantastic Mr fox
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: George Clooney, Meryl Streep
Runtime: 87 Mins
Rating: ***
Director Wes Anderson is not the most obvious choice for an animated adaption of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book Fantastic Mr Fox. His films are famous peculiar peppered with dry wit.
It follows that this is a beautiful, bizarre and audacious children’s film. However, parents will most certainly enjoy it more than their younglings, revelling in its visual trickery and sly references to genre films. The stop-motion animation is endearingly rendered; the jerky movement of the puppets are sweetly reminiscent of 60s British children’s TV shows. Anderson provides a masterclass in retro animation: billowing explosions of smoke are fashioned by curling and twisting bundles of cotton wool, while the farmers’ shotgun shells riddle the walls with delicately arranged ringlets of thread. And Anderson’s glowing golden palette of autumnal reds and browns bring a beautiful model world to life, instilled with a glorious vintage sheen.
Children probably won’t be enthralled by it. The action set pieces are presented in such deliberately idiosyncratic ways that they lack excitement. The menace of the villainous farmers is downplayed, never as ominous or darkly vicious as in the book. Roald Dahl characters, then, they are not. Similarly, there is a noticeable absence of peril throughout – tension and fine story-telling take a backseat to the meticulous niceties of animation and quaintly framed shots.
Dahl devotees may be dismayed to see the book’s dark tones and enchanting storytelling missing. Anderson fans however will leave the cinema positively beaming.
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