This weekend I sampled the new cinema in Witney, a wee market town a few miles west of Oxford. It's about time Witney had a decent cinema and I'm pleased to report that the first movie I saw there was very enjoyable indeed.
Fantastic Mr Fox has all the hallmarks of a Wes Anderson film: dysfunctional families and their foibles, themes of being different, and a robust and unapologetic retro quality, this time courtesy of handmade, stop-motion puppetry. Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzmann and Owen Wilson - all Anderson regulars - are present and correct to greater and lesser degrees. Only this time, they're providing vocal duties to animal characters based on the wonderful Roald Dahl story of the same name. Oh what fun it is.
Starring George Clooney doing a deliciously dapper Mr Fox and Meryl Streep as the long suffering Mrs Fox, the all-star cast do a great job of bringing the characters to life, the animals' lives a furry version of reality with the titular hero doing his best to outsmart the mean farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean, who shot his tail off and are determined to see him dead. The underfox against the Man, if you like. The farmers are all English, led by Michael Gambon as a particularly malicious Farmer Bean, whereas the animals - the good guys - are all Americans. Much has been made of this but it didn't bother me at all - how could it when the vocal performances were spot on? And there's nothing like a posh English accent to suggest the haves and haves nots ...
Fear not people, I'm not about to embark on a Marxist reading of a Roald Dahl adaptation. This movie is fun, fun, fun, garnering more laughs than any other Anderson movie. It references Ocean's Eleven, martial arts movies and most of all, Anderson's own back catalogue - my companion noted how similar it was to some of the sequences in The Life Aquatic. There are some scenes involving underground digging which echo Anderson's earlier movie strongly and the animals have the same trademark gestures as all Anderson's human creations. Simple effects carry the strongest humour, such as the apossum Kylie's zoned out eyes or Mr Fox's son Ash's pathological spitting and hunched demeanour, bitter at being 'little' (has there ever been a puppet fox who looked more like the owner of it's voice, Jason Schwartzmann?). And yet at the same time (if it's not too pretentious to say so), at the core of this movie is an existential message that you are unable to transcend your fundamental self: Mr Fox is a 'wild animal' after all.
Yes this movie is Americanised, yes it's source material is handled loosely, and yes it's fair to say it's geared more at Anderson's traditional adult audience than kids. But the gurgling chuckles of a littl'un behind me suggests there's enough slapstick and comedy to keep the youngsters happy, as well as the grown ups. And if anyone suggests any different, I can only say, in the words of Mr Fox, 'are you cussing with me?'
An absolute gem - catch it soon.
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