Fantastic Mr Fox
PG, Nationwide
Fantastic Mr Fox is actually no more than So-So Mr Fox, if that, and I was pretty bored right from the get-go. The animation is beautiful, the attention to detail is a thing of wonder — with enough mise-en-scènes to keep even the most fanatical mise-en-scène-ists happy — but the story is a mess, the script is banal and, as visually stunning as it all is, it just doesn’t seem to have any kind of soul. I don’t know what Roald Dahl, who wrote the original story, would say, but I’m betting it’s something along the lines of, ‘Clear off. I’m busy. Don’t come back.’ He was always quite grumpy, by all accounts, although you wouldn’t know it from this. You’d just think he was a sentimental old fool.
Directed by Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), who also adapted the story along with Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), I can see it wouldn’t have worked without significant elaboration. Fantastic Mr Fox is one of Dahl’s slighter stories, and is simply about a family of foxes who enter into a war with three farmers — Boggis, Bunce and Bean — from whom they have been stealing chickens. The farmers band together and destroy their home, sending the fox family underground where they team up with other animals and formulate a plan to outsmart the three dastardly Bs once and for all. It is and always has been a morally confusing tale. If we are against the farmers because they want to kill the fox, why are we not against the fox who wants to kill chickens? But enough of all that, especially as I am no moral philosopher, except for on Tuesday mornings and then only if I have the time.
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