Saturday, December 5, 2009

The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Despite boasting a terrific voice cast and entertaining stop-motion animation, Fantastic Mr. Fox ends up being merely very good, and not quite fantastic.

It's difficult to pinpoint what Fantastic Mr. Fox could've improved. The cast does as good of a job as is expected of such big names (George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Billy Murray, and Jason Schwartzman, among others). The animation, although somewhat old-school, is done superbly and is constantly entertaining. The story is fast paced and never drags, although occasionally it would've helped to have an occasional breather, as the story hops from plot point to plot point to plot point with no down-time in between.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that the fault lies directly in the way the screenplay was written. I enjoy most of the prevous movies written by Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited) and Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), yet I've also noticed that they occasionally write in a style that borders on self indulgent.

In Anderson's repertoire, I've never found Rushmore as exciting and poignant as most, as too much of the "humor" in it is, well, utterly unfunny. For the most part I believe Anderson's films work better as drama's with moments of dark comedy, rather than being billed purely as comedies (which they often are). As for Baumbach, I still can't figure out what the motivations were behind Margot at the Wedding, but it was over-long and, at times, almost painful to watch. While this is not necessarily a bad thing (some of the best movies test viewers' preconceptions and can make them feel uncomfortable), I couldn't really find the redemption in Margot and instead felt that it seemed puzzling unfinished.

The reason I mention these is because I found The Fantastic Mr. Fox to be filled with a lot of the "wink and a nudge" humor that didn't completely work in Rushmore and the sometimes hard to pinpoint character motivations that brought down Margot at the Wedding. I'm sure that it's supposed to be funny when Mr. Fox points out that the characters are wild animals (even though the "animals" act ostensibly like humans), it came across as smug and I found myself rolling my eyes. Other moments seemed to have the air of a collection of in-jokes.

That's not to say that these moments in the story completely bog down the film, because they don't. There are genuinely funny moments (Willem Dafoe's country bumpkin Rat; the fast-paced description of the game of Whackbat), and, at 87 minutes, Fantastic Mr. Fox has trimmed all of the excess fat and never drags. The story is interesting and entertaining, and some of the in-jokes that I just admonished still manage to work on some level, just maybe not at the level that Wes Anderson hoped that they would. It's possible that, being a Wes Anderson film, I expected too much from Fantastic Mr. Fox, and that these expectations made it difficult to fully enjoy the movie for what it was: An enjoyable lark that's much better than a lot of comedies that are churned out to theaters.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is not a terrible film or even a bad one. It's a very good film that, unfortunately, doesn't reach the transcendent level of greatness that it aspires.

Rating: 3.5 (out of 5)

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