After finally becoming a father Mr. Fox [George Clooney] decides to do the responsible thing and leave his life of farm thieving. However, after some years he decides to move into a new tree, which happens to be nearby Boggis [Robin Hurlstone], Bunce [Hugo Guinness] and Bean [Michael Gambon] who are some of the biggest and meanest farmers ever to exist and they don’t take kindly to their new neighbour.
Wes Anderson is the name that is proof that indie can become mainstream. I don’t think that there is another director that embodies the idea of the indie quirky comedy that people have fallen in love with nowadays than Wes Anderson, and as much as I love quirky comedies for some reason I tend to have trouble getting into Wes Anderson films. I liked Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums however I’ve never thought of Mr. Anderson as one of the great visions of this new generation of directors. I actually sometimes wonder how his movies make back its money (which apparently happens every once in a while), because all of the quirky comedies I love never seem to be that financially successful (e.g. The Go-Getter, Party Girl or Charlie Bartlett) but he has such a dedicated following I think that anyone who loves his style are there at a moment’s notice.
The truth of the matter is that the more I think about it all is the more I really liked this movie. What really drives it is the grand amount of great characters. One of my favourite characters was Rat [Willem Dafoe], he just had a certain swagger to him that made it hilarious to see on screen (especially since he was supposed to be the drunk security basically). I particularly enjoyed how he played his part towards the end of the film when we have a great fight sequence between Rat and Mr. Fox. I found myself especially enjoying the execution of things like that was where the filmmakers definitely knew the limitations of their medium (stop-motion animation) and found an appropriate way to get the point across and at the same time still entertain me.
The animation is another aspect of the movie that just had me blown away. If you’re someone who believes that everything needs to be technically up to date (i.e. have the best and greatest looking computer generated imagery) then you probably will have a problem enjoying this movie at all. I love that they decided to use this somewhat archaic version of stop-motion animation, because Coraline (which came out earlier this year) does look technically better than this but the character that this movie shows with the feel is something that cannot be reproduced with any amount of high quality perfectly designed rendering on a computer. Just seeing the way that the characters fur moved throughout moments was just adorable and I can’t help but want to reach out and grab these foxes and badgers and probably get bit. I know that Pixar has revolutionized how we think of animated films today, and visually pushed the envelope with each film they produce but it just because we’ve moved forward doesn’t mean that the older methods of animation need to discarded and this movie proves that point without a shadow of a doubt.
My only real problem with the movie was the narrative. The story itself is simple enough to put across on screen, however Mr. Anderson having made his characters as quirky as possibly decided that since he’s made it so hard to have his characters push the story forward he has to force it forward every step of the way with these titled segments of the film. So instead of having Mr. Fox perfectly explaining how he wants to do this final master heist on his farmer neighbours and then doing it like how most films would, Mr. Anderson has to just thrust us into the heist by titling the segment with “The Master Plan” and letting us the nice set piece it is. However, after the first twenty to thirty minutes of set up for the film the story plays out well and you enjoy the “wild animal craziness” that it is.
In the end I didn’t fall in love but at the same time I think that the movie was pretty ‘cussing’ good and anyone who is a fan of Wes Anderson or of this kind of animation needs to give it a watch.
IMDB says 8.3/10
Rotten Tomatoes says 92%
I say 8.0/10