Psycho's Movie Reviews #222: Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)

Fantastic Mr. Fox is a 2009 American stop motion animated comedy film directed by Wes Anderson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Noah Baumbach. The project is based on the 1970 children's novel of the same name by Roald Dahl. George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, and Owen Wilson star. The plot follows the titular character Mr. Fox (Clooney), as his spree of thefts results in his family, and later his community, being hunted down by three farmers known as Boggis (Robin Hurlstone), Bunce (Hugo Guinness), and Bean (Michael Gambon).

Development on the project began in 2004 as a collaboration between Anderson and Henry Selick (who worked with Anderson on the 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) under Revolution Studios. In 2007, Revolution and Selick left for other projects; work on the film was moved to 20th Century Fox under the 20th Century Fox Animation label, where production began in 2007. Released in the United States on November 13, 2009, to critical acclaim, with praise for Anderson’s direction, humour, and stop-motion animation. However, it underperformed at the box office, grossing just $46.5 million against a $40 million budget. The film received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, losing the award to Up.

Plot

While raiding Berk's Squab Farm, Mr. Fox triggers a fox trap caging himself along with his wife Felicity. Felicity reveals to her husband that she is pregnant and pleads with him to find a safer job if they escape, and he agrees.

Two human years (12 fox years) later, the Foxes and their son Ash are living in a hole. Mr. Fox, now a newspaper columnist, moves the family into a better home inside a tree, ignoring the warnings of his lawyer, about how dangerous the area is for foxes due to its proximity to facilities run by three feared farmers: Boggis (a chicken farmer), Bunce (a duck and goose farmer) and Bean (a turkey and apple farmer).

Soon after the Foxes move in, Felicity's nephew, Kristofferson Silverfox, comes to live with them. Ash finds this situation intolerable; his cousin is superior to him at almost everything, and everyone is charmed by Kristofferson. Longing for his days as a thief, Mr. Fox and his friend Kylie, an opossum, steal produce and poultry from all three farms for three straight nights. Angered, the farmers decide to kill Mr. Fox. They camp out near his home, and when Mr. Fox emerges, they open fire but only manage to shoot off his tail. After demolishing the site of the tree while attempting to dig Mr. Fox out, they discover the Foxes have dug an escape tunnel. As the Foxes will have to surface for food and water, the farmers wait at the tunnel mouth. Underground, Felicity is upset that Mr. Fox returned to his thieving ways.

The group later encounters Badger and many other local animal residents whose homes have also been destroyed by the farmers. As the animals begin fearing starvation, Mr. Fox leads them on a digging expedition to tunnel to the three farms, robbing them.

While the other animals feast, Ash and Kristofferson begin to reconcile after Kristofferson defends Ash from a bully. The cousins return to Bean's farm, intending to reclaim the missing tail but Kristofferson gets captured.

Discovering that Mr. Fox has stolen their produce, the farmers and the fire chief flood the animals' tunnel network with some of Bean's cider, trapping the animals in the sewers.

Realizing that the farmers plan to use Kristofferson to lure him into an ambush, Mr. Fox heads to the surface to surrender, but returns when Rat, Bean's violent security guard, confronts the animals and attacks Ash and Felicity. A fight between Mr. Fox and Rat results in the latter being pushed into a generator, electrocuting him. Before dying, Rat reveals Kristofferson's location. Mr. Fox asks the farmers for a meeting in town near the sewer hub where he would surrender in exchange for Kristofferson's freedom.

The farmers prepare an ambush, but the animals, anticipating it, launch a counterattack that allows Mr. Fox, Ash, and Kylie to enter Bean's farm undetected. Ash frees Kristofferson and braves enemy fire to release a rabid beagle to keep the farmers at bay, allowing the group to escape.

As the farmers fruitlessly wait for the animals to come out of the hole, the animals soon settle into their new homes in the sewers, inviting any other animals to join them. Soon after, Fox raids a grocery store belonging to Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, where Felicity reveals she's pregnant again as the animals dance in the aisle.

Production

Joe Roth and Revolution Studios bought the film rights to Fantastic Mr Fox in 2004. In 2006, Mark Mothersbaugh stated that he was working on the soundtrack. Wes Anderson signed on as director with Henry Selick, who worked with Anderson on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, as animation director. Anderson stated that he signed on because Roald Dahl was one of his heroes. Originally, Cate Blanchett was to voice Mrs. Fox, but she left the role for undisclosed reasons.

The story the novel covers would amount to the second act of the film. Anderson added new scenes to serve for the film's beginning and end. The new scenes precede Mr. Fox's plan to steal from the three farmers and follow the farmers' bulldozing of the hill, beginning with the flooding of the tunnel. Selick left the project, to work on the Neil Gaiman story Coraline in February 2006. He was replaced by Mark Gustafson. 20th Century Fox Animation became the project's home in October 2006 after Revolution left for other projects.

In September 2007, Anderson announced voice work would begin. The director chose to record the voices outside rather than in a studio: "we went out in a forest, went in an attic, and went in a stable. We went underground for some things. There was a great spontaneity in the recordings because of that." The voices were recorded before any animation was done.

Anderson said of the production design, "we want to use real trees and real sand, but it's all miniature." Great Missenden, where Roald Dahl lived, has a major influence on the film's look. The film mixes several forms of animation but consists primarily of stop motion. Animation took place in London, on Stage C at 3 Mills Studios and the puppets are created by Mackinnon & Saunders, with Anderson directing the crew, many of whom animated Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. Selick, who kept in contact with Anderson, said the director would act out scenes while in Paris and send them to the animators via iPhone.

Music

The score for the film was composed by Alexandre Desplat. Jarvis Cocker commented that he wrote "three, four" songs for the film, one of which was included on the soundtrack ("Fantastic Mr. Fox A.K.A. Petey's Song"). The soundtrack also contains a selection of songs by The Beach Boys, The Bobby Fuller Four, Burl Ives, Georges Delerue, The Rolling Stones, and other artists. A soundtrack album for the film was released on November 3, 2009.

Release/Reception/Box Office

The film had its world premiere as the opening film of the 53rd edition of the London Film Festival on October 14, 2009. 20th Century Fox released it theatrically on November 13, 2009. Fantastic Mr. Fox grossed $21,002,919 in the U.S., and $25,468,104 outside the U.S., making a total of $46,471,023 worldwide.

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released the DVD and Blu-ray on March 23, 2010. The Criterion Collection released the film on Blu-ray and DVD on February 18, 2014.

On streaming, Fantastic Mr. Fox was added on Disney+ in the US and Canada on May 22, 2020.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 93% based on 245 reviews and an average rating of 7.90/10. The site's consensus states: "Fantastic Mr. Fox is a delightfully funny feast for the eyes with multi-generational appeal – and it shows Wes Anderson has a knack for animation." The film also became the second highest-rated animated film in 2009 on the site, behind Up. On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 83 out of 100 based on 34 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars out of four, writing that, like Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, children may find some aspects of the film perplexing or scary, which he considered a positive element to a children's film. A. O. Scott called Fantastic Mr. Fox "in some ways (Wes Anderson's) most fully realized and satisfying film. Once you adjust to its stop-and-start rhythms and its scruffy looks, you can appreciate its wit, its beauty and the sly gravity of its emotional undercurrents. The work done by the animation director, Mark Gustafson, by the director of photography, Tristan Oliver, and by the production designer, Nelson Lowry, shows amazing ingenuity and skill, and the music (by Alexandre Desplat, with the usual shuffle of well-chosen pop tunes, famous and obscure) is both eccentric and just right." Devin D. O'Leary of Weekly Alibi called it "a one-of-a-kind family classic".

According to Time, the film is "both a delightful amusement and a distillation of the filmmaker's essential playfulness" and was one of the ten best films of the year. Cosmo Landesman of The Sunday Times said "having a quirky auteur like Anderson make a children's film is a bit like David Byrne, of Talking Heads, recording an album of nursery rhymes produced by Brian Eno"; according to Landesman, "in style and sensibility, this is really a Wes Anderson film, with little Dahl. It's missing the darker elements that characterise Dahl's books. There you find the whiff of something nasty: child abuse, violence, misogyny. Gone, too, is any sense of danger. Even the farmers, who are made to look a touch evil, don't seem capable of it. We never feel the tension of watching the Fox family facing real peril. The film certainly has Americanized Dahl's story, and I don't mean the fact that the good animals have American accents and the baddies have British ones. It offers yet another celebration of difference and a lesson on the importance of being yourself. But it does leave you thinking: isn't it time that children's films put children first?"

Amy Biancolli from the Houston Chronicle stated that "Anderson injects such charm and wit, such personality and nostalgia — evident in the old-school animation, storybook settings and pitch-perfect use of Burl Ives — that it's easy to forgive his self-conscious touches."

Ann Hornaday from the Washington Post calls it a "self-consciously quirky movie that manages to be twee and ultra-hip at the same time, it qualifies as yet another wry, carefully composed bibelot in the cabinet of curios that defines the Anderson oeuvre." Peter Howell from the Toronto Star stated that "in an age when everything seems digital, computer-driven and as fake as instant coffee, more and more artists (Spike Jonze and John Lasseter among them) are embracing the old ways of vinyl records, hand-drawn cartoons and painstaking stop-motion character movements." In 2011, Richard Corliss of TIME magazine named it one of "The 25 All-TIME Best Animated Films".

Budget $40 million

Box office $46.5 million

My Review

I made a small review in third grade of Fantastic Mr. Fox- a book which I loved fondly- and seeing this film brought me back to that, only better and bolder, but with the same handmade quality of someone awed by the world they read. It's also wildly funny and cheerfully light-and-heavy all at once. It brings director Wes Anderson's concerns as a filmmaker to light, as usual (dysfunctional family, idiosyncratic touches with the characters, absurd child-but-adult-like comedy), and in a setting that is a fantasy that anyone can attach to. Children will latch on to it because of its cute/creepy designs, and its raucous energy. Adults will eat it up because, like with Where the Wild Things Are, it brings us back to a time when we just want to have a fun time and do things, even if we might know or thing they're wrong, or maybe just to dance at very odd moments.

From there it becomes a battle of wills and, sometimes, real fire power and acorn-bombs and a rabid dog and other wild craziness. Oh, and the stop-motion. Thanks be to someone out there: there's filmmakers still going through the painstaking but endlessly creative process of frame-by-frame film-making where it takes dozens of hours to get just a few seconds of film. People like Anderson and Henry Selick seek out the limitations so they can break through them, or toy around with them as much as possible.

With the characterization of 'Mr. Fox', Anderson and his animation team gives us creatures whose hair is always slightly blowing in the wind (something that must have been hard to attain being shot frame by frame), have eyes that are motorized and look like real human eyes almost, and water (or apple cider) when it flows becomes rather dreamlike and appears like we haven't seen it before. That all of the characters have something amazing to their features, be it the way Mr. Fox gnarls his teeth and then does his trademark whistle or to how Rat clicks his fingers like a West Side Story villain, there's something happening every other second. You might figure out how this is all done, but it's not as much concern as what they do with their creations, like kids with action figures making an epic on 8mm film.

Fantastic Mr. Fox has the childlike wonder, the modestly dazzling sets and production design (art-Anderson is basically the way to put it by now with his films, from the title cards of species identification to maps and chapter-headings), and an original sense of perspective when it comes to action scenes and simple little camera moves that comes off extraordinary in this setting. But it's also, mostly, hysterically funny. It's not a crude funny like the Hangover or too bizarre like the Men Who Stare at Goats. It's sometimes just plain awkward, or just totally unexpected, or built around an absurdity that comes up and down like the explanation of how to play Whackbat, or Mrs. Bean and her blindness. Or just a line of dialog ("He's just another rat found in the back of a Chinese restaurant") sets off a belly laugh that's hard to contain. This is, at the least, the funniest of all the Dahl adaptations, keeping to the surrealism of animals and humans alike, while sticking to a perfectly dry, off-handed approach by its filmmaker.

As with everything else in the movie, the comedy feels home-grown, not in a Hollywood lab where everything's tested. This goes too for the excellent voice work that brings Anderson/Baumbach's dialog to fruition. In the theatrical trailer, when first seen, the voices of Clooney and Streep and Bill Murray almost distracted from the quality of the animation. But in full context, they all work, even Anderson himself as a real-estate agent creature. And the outdoor-not-in-studio recording of the voices does add something extra: you feel like there's something real going on, not just in fantasy, thanks to the actors and their "on-set" work. I'm sure some extra ideas or expressiveness came out of this, because the performances are a great part of what makes this world so tangible: we know these people and animals, sort of, at least as much as any other Wes Anderson movie.

And sure, they're foxes, but why not connect with the theme while we're at it? The film is lovely and insane, smart and silly, lovable and (for a few moments) a little scary, with a kick-ass soundtrack straight out of a record collection (and musical store) that connects just right right this spectacular place of someplace-England. And hey, why not some existentialism to top it off: "Who am I? And how can a fox ever be happy without, you'll forgive the expression, a chicken in its teeth?" How indeed? "I don't know what you're talking about, but it sounds illegal."

For those who are looking for a 100% faithful adaptation of Roald Dahl's book, I think they will be disappointed. Lacking the dark edge of Dahl's book and of his writing in general, Fantastic Mr Fox is not so good as an adaptation, however on its own terms it is wonderful. It is an endearing and hugely enjoyable film.

One thing that stood out was how the film looked. Instead of the CGI rendered effects, Wes Anderson opts for a more old-fashioned stop-motion effect. This decision worked, because the visual look is outstanding, not just in the beautifully detailed backgrounds and sets but in how the characters move as well and the small details such as the armchair in his writing hut.

I like Alexandre Desplat's music quite a bit. His score for Fantastic Mr Fox is no exception, it is quirky yet still has the minimalist style that makes Desplat stand out. The story is sometimes slow in the pace but because of the humour and how it looked, I never found the film boring, besides the story itself is so good. The writing is great, the humour is more adult but a vast majority of it is very funny with the odd touching moment too.

The characters add a lot. Mr Fox is one of my favourite titular characters in a book and the film did little to change that, and while some are slightly underused they serve their purpose well. The voice work is fantastic. I wasn't sure about George Clooney, but he does do a bravura job, and Meryl Streep is quite touching. Michael Gambon is sterling, as is Bill Murray as Badger.

In conclusion, hugely enjoyable and one of my personal favourites of 2009. 9/10

{Honestly it had been a while since I last watched this film. And honestly, the one thing I remembered from this film was the soundtrack. Specifically two songs: 'Let Her Dance' by Bobby Fuller Four (it appears at the end when the Fox family are dancing in the supermarket) and the original score of 'Canis Lupus' (aka The Wolf Scene) - no joke this song makes me feel things, they should have made it longer}

{Let Her Dance - Bobby Fuller Four}

https://youtu.be/sYZ40lDrqb0?list=TLPQMjIwMTIwMjKljmclcbIOkQ

{Canis Lupus - Alexandre Desplat}

https://youtu.be/B8IjaQ5SP48?list=TLPQMjIwMTIwMjKljmclcbIOkQ