Fantastic Mr. Fox

Editorial

In this era of photo-realising the fantastic and precision-made stop-motion prettyscapes, it is oddly gratifying to find that Wes Anderson, in his first sole venture into an animated universe, is having none of it. He is still busy ploughing his wry indie groove, only now in the guise of miniature foxes of rubbery complexion.

Despite remaining Roald Dahl's caustic morality tale about a conceited fox, it is also demonstrably one of Anderson's mild-mannered odes to crackpot families of neurotics and nitwits. The story starts and finishes with Mr. Fox's inability to settle down as he — roping in his putz of a best friend, Rickity — plots a series of foolish raids on nearby farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean.

The upshot, amongst many, is that Mr. Fox will lose his tail (a dent in his fox-about-town image) and the local animal community will lose its community. Meanwhile, he also can't connect with his under-sized, self-absorbed cub, Ash (Schwartzman), a situation exacerbated by the arrival of Ash's cousin, a top-fox at sport, vixens and, so it proves, chicken robbery.

Such storytelling delight comes not in the exactitude of the animation, although it has a certain psychedelic dazzle, but how cunningly it conveys character, humour and, like Nick Park's screwy Yorkshire, a deviant version of modern life.

George Clooney's Mr. Fox is smarmy both in the actor's unhurried delivery of his mid-life crisis and in silky texture, while Meryl Streep's Mrs. Fox has a softness both in her sighing over a luckless marriage and in her orangeade-coloured fur that stands on end when her husband's braggadocio leads this menagerie of Wind In The Willows drop-outs into a succession of jams. It may be slight as a feather and vexing for Dahl purists, but for a film so outwardly bonkers, it works like a dream.

Ian Nathan