Wes Anderson’s first animated feature opens on a squab farm, and within minutes Mr. Fox has broken the one promise that mattered. Fantastic Mr. Fox premiered as the opening film of the 53rd BFI London Film Festival on October 14, 2009, before a UK release on October 23 and a US release on November 13. It runs 87 minutes. That is long enough to build a world and short enough to never wear it out.
Trailer, via SearchlightPictures.
George Clooney and the Trap at Berk’s Squab Farm
The film opens with Mr. Fox and his wife, Felicity, caught in a trap while raiding Berk’s Squab Farm. Felicity tells him she is pregnant and makes him promise to find a safer job. Twelve fox-years later, the Foxes and their son, Ash, live in a hole. Mr. Fox ignores his lawyer Clive Badger’s warnings and moves the family into a tree, close to the farms of Walt Boggis, Nate Bunce and Frank Bean.
George Clooney voices Mr. Fox with the ease of a man who has never once doubted himself. Meryl Streep plays Felicity as the only creature in the film who sees the whole board. Jason Schwartzman’s Ash is a small, furious study in wanting a father’s approval.
Three Farmers, One Tail, and a Cider Flood
The farmers shoot off Mr. Fox’s tail and destroy his home. The Foxes go underground, where Badger and many other animals whose homes the farmers wrecked are already living. The homeless animals blame the Foxes and fear starvation, so Mr. Fox leads a digging expedition to tunnel into the three farms and steal their prized goods.
Bean’s cider floods the tunnel network, washing the animals into the sewers. Ash and Kristofferson slip away to Bean’s farm to reclaim the missing tail. Bean’s wife catches them and takes Kristofferson. Mr. Fox heads for the surface to surrender but returns when Rat, Bean’s security guard, confronts the animals and attacks Ash and Felicity.
| Element | Book (1970) | Film (2009) |
|---|---|---|
| Mr. Fox | Confident thief | Self-conscious, in existential crisis |
| Felicity | — | Named, pregnant, extracts the promise |
| Kristofferson | — | Nephew, arrives during the story |
| Rat | — | Bean’s violent security guard |
What the Stop-Motion Actually Does
Anderson moved the project to 20th Century Fox and began production in 2007 on Stage C of 3 Mills Studios in London. The stop-motion is the reason to watch. Fur moves. Dirt moves. The animals have the slightly wrong, handmade quality that computer animation sands off. Alexandre Desplat wrote the score, and the soundtrack folds in songs from other artists.
The film earned Academy Award nominations for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score. It lost both to Up. It grossed $47.1 million against a $40 million budget, which counts as underperforming, and it is now ranked among the best animated films of the century.
Dig the life fantastic.
Why the Farmers Work as Villains
Boggis, Bunce and Bean stand in for the wealthy, and the film never pretends otherwise. They own the land, the chickens and the cider. The animals own nothing but the tunnels they dig. Mr. Fox’s raids are not heroism. They are burglary, and the farmers’ revenge follows directly from his narcissism and his reliance on burglary.
That is the sharpest thing in the script, which Anderson wrote with Noah Baumbach. The film gives Mr. Fox an existential crisis, a newer house he did not need, and a regression into old habits to put better food on the table. His pride puts his family in danger, and he only sees it at the end.
The Verdict on Fantastic Mr. Fox
The moral lands without a speech: do not let self-pride get in the way of the people you love. Anderson gets there through a fight with a rat, a flooded sewer and a son who just wants to be seen. No lecture required.
The $47.1 million gross is the least interesting number here. Seventeen years on, what matters is that Anderson took a slim children’s novel and found the anxiety underneath it, then handed that anxiety to Clooney and Streep and a room full of puppets.
This is the part worth watching: a family film that admits failure is survivable, that a home can be destroyed and rebuilt, and that a father can be wrong for most of the runtime and still worth following. The stop-motion carries it, the voice cast sells it, and the ending earns it.
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