Movie Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Perhaps Fantastic Mr. Fox will be the film that convinces adults that animation isn't just for kids.

Indeed, given the sensibility of writer-director Wes Anderson, Mr. Fox is barely a movie for kids, despite its Roald Dahl pedigree. Anderson's delicious take on life and movies may amuse youngsters -- but not as much as it will tickle adults, with its delightfully anthropomorphized forest creatures who can't quite escape their animal nature.

That idea -- that animal nature is a given that even the most thoughtful creature can't avoid -- is at the heart of this oddly funny and endearing film, made in stop-motion animation. Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach have adapted Dahl's fantasy tale in their own voices, in a way that preserves the basics but makes it uniquely their own.

Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is a family man with a larcenous heart. His instinct tells him to raid the local chicken coops -- but his love for his wife (Meryl Streep) has made him promise to give it all up and settle down, working a less dangerous job. (The irony, of course, is that Anderson gives him a job as a columnist at a newspaper, as endangered a species as you can find today.) Continued...

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Comments

[pons1595]

I am confused--just why is it at all necessary to persuade adults to like cartoons because you use the euphemism of animation?

[camb94]

This is the first kids' film in a long time, that I have been anxious to see. I have watched the trailers a dozen times and laugh each time.