MR. and Mrs. Fox live an idyllic home life with their son Ash and visiting young nephew Kristopherson. But after 12 years, the bucolic existence proves too much for Mr Fox’s wild animal instincts. Soon he slips back into his old ways as a sneaky chicken thief and in doing so, endangers not only his beloved family, but the whole animal community. Trapped underground and with not enough food to go around, the animals band together to fight against the evil farmers—Boggis, Bunce and Bean—who are determined to capture the audacious, fantastic Mr. Fox at any cost.
Review
THIS adaptation of the Roald Dahl tale does more than occupying its own particular space between the worlds of childhood and adults. It provides a pleasantly cerebral experience, exhilarating and fizzy, that goes to your head like too much Champagne.
Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
ONCE you adjust to its stop-and-start rhythms and its scruffy looks, you can appreciate its wit, its beauty and the sly gravity of its emotional undercurrents.
The point of everything Mr. Anderson has ever done is that truth and beauty reside in the odd, the mismatched, the idiosyncratic. He makes that point in ways that are sometimes touching, sometimes annoying, but usually worth arguing about. Roald Dahl’s books, suspicious of authority and repelled by conformity, full of unruly energy and wanton invention, have a similar appeal.
There is one scene, in which a character dies a violent death, that may be too chilling for some younger viewers to handle. But at the same time it is precisely the movie that a child smitten with Roald Dahl’s fiction and fascinated by the enigmas of the adult world would dream of making: something to amaze and terrify the grown-ups and win the envy and adulation of his peers.
A. O. Scott, The New York Times
FANTASTIC Mr. Fox presents a sublime example of what can be done with this painstaking, old-school form of animation. The beautiful anthropomorphic animal puppets inhabit a whimsical diorama of old-fashioned cars, motorbikes, and domestic accouterments. The film has a three-dimensional quality, a sense of movement and depth, that’s at once wholly artificial and wholly inviting.
But Fantastic Mr. Fox is more than just a terrific kid flick, a whimsical fable brought to life. Fox wrestles with existential dilemmas. Fox is struggling to reconcile his wild animal nature, his innate restlessness, with the refined pleasures of life. In its swift, sublime 87 minutes, Anderson has taken the gist of Dahl’s slim volume and expanded it into a sometimes funny, occasionally scary, always enchanting adventure that really, when you come down to it, is about the challenges all of us face in life.
