FANTASTIC MR. FOX

This stop-motion animated story, based on a tale by Roald Dahl, is of course fun, and, with Wes Anderson's touch, kinda weird. It is hard to describe why it is weird, but, well, it just is.

Wes Anderson has a quirky dry comedy style that is familiar to anyone who has seen his previous films like Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, or The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I've *liked* his movies, but I found that I don't LOVE them, like many critics. Sometimes his style seems like overloading on clever, for the sake of being clever. But the movies do make me laugh, even if I don't think they are the second coming.

What is fascinating about Fantastic Mr. Fox is that not only is it animated, but it is stop-motion animation. Think of those early Rudolph the Red-Nosed Raindeer TV specials, or Ray Harryhausen flicks like the original Clash of the Titans. The film is shot a frame at a time, as the characters and other objects in the scene are moved millimeter by millimeter. That in itself is cool, especially as these characters are fuzzy with REAL fur. But I digress.

Mr. Fox is of course a cool cat (so to speak) as he is voiced by cool cat George Clooney. He and Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) have a teenage (in fox years) son named Ash (Jason Schwartzman) who is not as inherently slick as his foxy dad, but strives to make a name for himself. It doesn't help that his effortlessly talented and cool cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson) shows up and upstages him.

But Mr. Fox, despite his straight-laced, bringing home the bacon job, is restless. He used to have quite the reputation for outfoxing farmers and stealing chickens, but Mrs. Fox made him clean up his act. When the Foxes move up in the world, buying a beautiful home in a tree on a hill, Mr. Fox salivates when he sees the view of the three most high-security chicken farms just across the valley. It's just too tempting...

Fantastic Mr. Fox is full of many amusing critter and human characters, my favorite being Kylie the Opossum (Wallace Wolodarsky) and Badger (Bill Murray). The story, based on a tale by Roald Dahl, is of course fun, and, with Wes Anderson's touch, kinda weird. It is hard to describe why it is weird, but, well, it just is. And with its self-knowing cleverness off the charts, it was kind of a relief that it wrapped up under 90 minutes.

But then watching the extras on the DVD, I ended up liking the film more. OK, maybe watching the extras, I was actually just more jealous of the animators. Instead of sitting at a desk job, these people are making furry animal puppets, and creating crazy animated scenes, locked in a room for hours to make minutes (seconds?) of footage. How fun is that? Fantastically fun, I'd say!