""Fantastic Mr. Fox"" is a movie that most ""in-the-know"" viewers will likely approach with a considerable degree of apprehension. The film's director, Wes Anderson, has long been preceded by his reputation for churning out overly cute tributes to an idealized version of the history of cinema. But while Anderson and his sensibility have seemingly been sentenced by the brutally hip to the trendiness gulag, I propose that now's as good a time as any to re-evaluate his mark as a film artist. After all, this task is hardly a daunting one: Anderson himself has already done most of the legwork for us in ""Mr. Fox.""
Trying one's hand at making an animated film is nothing if not a ballsy move, for there isn't a more hit-or-miss genre. Though beloved by both intellectuals and Alaskans, CG animation discards much of what is most alluring about cinema: Even the most high-tech, special effects-laden live-action films bare traces of their own material genesis, like a brushstroke on a canvas or a cross-out in a manuscript. In CG animation, all of that implicit physicality is replaced with graphic bombast and aesthetic obesity. The frame tends to swell and burst with so much stimulation that the viewer scarcely knows what to do with it all. As a stop-motion animation film, ""Mr. Fox"" is firstly a monument to the human labor that went into its own painstaking production. And that monument trembles with just the right amount of speed, noise, slickness and color. At any given moment the viewer is likely to mistake the screen for a pumpkin and corduroy milkshake. ""Fantastic Mr. Fox"" is an indisputable pleasure to look at, but what about watching it?
It's perhaps too well-known at this point that Anderson invites the label of ""auteur"" through the sheer number of indiscreet nods his films make to the history of cinema. His past works have very self-consciously alluded to François Truffaut, Francis Ford Coppola, Louis Malle and Satyajit Ray, to name a quick and iconic four. For some, this was equivalent to shouting ""I WAS INFLUENCED BY THE FOLLOWING FRENCH DIRECTORS."" Thankfully, the points of reference in ""Mr. Fox"" are more suggested than declared.
Anderson's oeuvre has more or less consisted of idiosyncratic genre films: ""Rushmore"" was a coming-of-age tale, ""The Royal Tenenbaums"" was a family drama, ""The Life Aquatic"" was... alright, you get the point. ""Mr. Fox"" is a heist film whose swagger is descended from the most debonair of French noirs: ""Rififi,"" ""Le cercle rouge,"" ""Touchez pas au grisbi,"" ""Bob le flambeur,"" etc. However, what you can't quite get from Jean-Pierre Melville's mannerist curb-stomps is a cocktail of sopping-wet slapstick and bone-dry pith, stirred and served cold (though not too cold); ""Fantastic Mr. Fox,"" on the other hand...
As grin-inducing as each of the film's 87 minutes is, politically anal viewers might accuse ""Mr. Fox""—and this charge has been levied against all of Anderson's films—of bourgeois myopia (i.e. it only concerns itself, however indirectly, with ""rich person problems""). Yes, the film's sense of humor partly caters to a crowd that doesn't react to hearing the name""Balzac"" with a collective snicker. Yet I was far from the only member of the audience who laughed at the first mention of ""fox-hours"" or who was genuinely affected when Mrs. Fox tells her husband ""I love you, but I shouldn't have married you"" or who grinned like an idiot at the first appearance of Fox's lawyer, the Bill Murray-voiced Badger.
I still don't think there's much that a tragically critical mind can do with a movie such as this; that said, you're really, really going to like this film.
