Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009): Favourite Films Series

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009): Favourite Films Series

 

I’ve been a big fan of stop motion animation ever since I was a child. One of the earliest examples that I’m sure many others can relate to as far as being memorable and charming was Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer, the Rankin/Bass Christmas special that has aired on TV every year since it came out. As far as feature-length theatrically-released stop motion films, one of the most popular is The Nightmare Before Christmas, but that one never really clicked with me. Surprisingly, my favourite in this sub-genre is not one I saw for the first time when I was a child, though. It’s not from Aardman (Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit are both great, though) and it’s not from Laika Studios (famous for multiple features as well, like Coraline and Missing Link), it’s by one of the quirkiest directors working today, Wes Anderson, and it completely swept me off my feet the first time I watched it.

I had never seen a Wes Anderson movie before Fantastic Mr. Fox, so all the Wes Anderson-isms were new to me, but after you’ve seen a few of his movies, you start to notice similarities in the way he tells a story, visually and narratively. Everything is framed in a very particular way, lit in an interesting way, acted in a particular way, and I could go on and on about his directing style alone, but I’m here to focus on his first stop motion film (as of writing this he has made one other, Isle Of Dogs) and why Fantastic Mr. Fox is not just my favourite stop motion film, but my favourite Wes Anderson film, and one of my favourite films of all-time.

I loved Roald Dahl’s books throughout elementary school, but for some reason Fantastic Mr. Fox wasn’t one I read, so I was unfamiliar with the source material going into the movie, which it adapts somewhat loosely. The story follows Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney), a thief who is caught stealing chickens with his wife (Meryl Streep). She tells him if they get out of this they are going to have a cub and he has to retire. This comes to pass, but two human years/12 fox years later, Foxy has moved his family out of their hole and into a tree near three farms owned by Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, which inspires him to pull one last job and steal from all three. The heists get him in trouble with the trio of farmers. They team up and try to dig Foxy and his family out. It leads to all the woodland creatures becoming jeopardized, so he has to hatch a new plan to outfox the farmers and save his family and friends.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is rated PG “for action, smoking, and slang humour” which is a rating I find funny, mainly for the smoking part. It’s definitely not purely a kid’s film, but feels like something the whole family can watch, with some humour that’s for the adults only and a storyline that will appeal to anyone who likes a good story. It deals with some bigger issues around being a responsible husband and parent, as well as just featuring some very unique characters in some funny situations. The characters are all charming in their own ways, but if I had to pick my top three, it would be Foxy, who is a fun main character, perfectly voiced by George Clooney, with a great trademark of a whistle and a click and a salute (words can’t do it justice, you see it and you get it), and Kylie, an opossum who packs around a bucket of minnows and goes blank when Foxy talks to him (his eyes shown to be vacant spirals, and after this happens more than once Foxy tells him he needs to give him a signal or something so he knows if anything is getting through to him, and his action is just as vacant and hilarious), and Foxy’s nephew Kristofferson, who unintentionally upstages his cousin Ash left and right. He’s one of the quieter characters, but no less great because of it. 

The humour is simultaneously accessible and inaccessible, and the first time I saw the movie I had no idea what to expect, so I almost wasn’t even sure if I liked it, but it has not only held up with every re-watch, it has gotten funnier for me. Some of the jokes come out of nowhere which makes them even funnier, but the humour never feels forced or undercuts any important moment, it’s all well balanced. When Foxy declares the only way to escape the farmers is to “Dig!” it switches to a hilarious visual gag of them burrowing into the earth in a cartoony way, and it works as well as it does because of Anderson’s perfect framing.

Visually, every shot is a work of art. The way characters sometimes seem to teleport around adds another layer to the humour and adds to the aesthetic. The foreground and background are often extremely distinct and when characters move from one to another it’s interesting to see—and that’s something I doubt you would say about many other films. It sounds like a minor detail, but no minor detail is without Anderson putting careful thought and consideration into it.

Beyond all the visuals (from the gags to the designs of the characters and settings to the framing and editing), the way the movie sounds is also perfectly calibrated. The music by Alexandre Desplat is understated but extremely effective and fits perfectly with the tone. It’s funny to think he would go on to score Godzilla (2014) only five years later and create such a grand, bombastic new theme for the King of the Monsters when you hear the simple, quiet guitar filling the background of scenes with stop motion foxes trotting around. I already commented on George Clooney being the perfect voice for Foxy, but every voice is perfect, from Bill Murray as the grumpy badger lawyer to Willem Dafoe as a southern-accented mean old rat.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is the quintessential example of why stop motion animation is such a great moviemaking technique, and it can be argued whether or not this is Wes Anderson’s best film (many would disagree that it is) but I think it lends particularly well to his style. There is a huge number of characters in this film to love—sometimes a movie can feel like it has too many characters, but in this case it does not, and every one of them gets a moment to stand out. If you have never seen a Wes Anderson film, this isn’t a bad one to start out with, and if you like stop motion, it is absolutely essential viewing.