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Directed by Wes Anderson
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Fantastic Mr.
Fox Life
Aquatic with Steve Zissou” is the marvelous
cutaway of the ship (at sea, supposedly), with people walking from one end to
another, conversing all the time.
What I remember about “The Royal Tenenbaums”
is the casual acceptance of the bizarre, as though the bizarre were right and
you and I and society itself all turned out to be wrong. What I remember about “The
Darjeeling Limited” was the enormous set of Louis Vuitton
luggage that had to be carried everywhere but never opened. And
oddly enough, what I remember about “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is the
cartoonish way characters’ eyes change from looking forward to
reflecting confusion or hurt by having their eyeballs turn into rotating
little spirals or Xes in closeup. What it says, of course, is that this
is a Wes Anderson film, which is both a good and a
bad thing. In a sense, Mr.
Anderson is a bit like Tim Burton; we can pick apart their films, but at the
same time we’re grateful that they make them at all because no one else
does it like they do. “Fantastic
Mr. Fox” is a riff on Roald Dahl’s
children’s book; I say a riff, because Anderson and his co-writer Noah Baumbach have used the superb little book, with its
rhymes and incredibly neat story and taken it into a whole new dimension,
something like a jazz riff that starts with the original melody, goes way off
into the musician’s own head, and then comes back at the end to the
melody again. Sometimes it works
and sometimes it doesn’t.
Here I’m not so sure.
Instead of focusing on the tug of war between Mr. Fox and the evil
trilogy of Boggis, Bunce
and Bean, we have a whole world below-ground: Mr. and Mrs. Fox, their son,
his cousin, their lawyer, and a whole slew of neighbors and friends. The goal is still the same: to find a
way to steal chickens from Boggis, Bunce and Burns and bring them below to be eaten. But
Anderson and Baumbach have put almost too much into
the film that does not advance the plot or reveal character, but seems almost
like seeing how clever they can be, something like throwing filler at the
wall and watching to see which will stick. The voices of the actors are fine, but
the lines are dull; that should never happen in an animated film. Maybe Anderson should choose another
co-writer next time; he’s done it before and it worked. |