Average customer review:
Fantastic Mr. Fox
“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is a proudly analog animated entertainment, making its handmade way into a marketplace glutted with digital goodies. Next to the three-dimensional, computer-generated creatures that swoop and soar off the screen these days, the furry talking animals on display here, with their matted pelts, jerky movements and porcelain eyes, might look a little quaint, like old-fashioned wind-up toys uneasily sharing the shelf with the latest video game platforms. At times this adaptation of Roald Dahl’s slender anti-fable — truer to the spirit than to the letter of the source — does not even look like a movie. In spite of the pedigreed voices (Meryl Streep and Bill Murray, along with George Clooney in the title role), it feels more like an extended episode of what progressive educators call imaginative play. The sets might just as well have been built out of available household stuff, the stiff figurines animated and ventriloquized on a classroom or bedroom floor by precocious children.
All of which may only be another way of saying that this is a Wes Anderson film. The spirit of self-conscious juvenile playacting has informed his work from the start, providing a theme for “Rushmore” and a sensibility for everything else. His live-action subjects often move like stop-motion figures through landscapes that resemble drawings and models more than real places. (Think of the cutaway ship set in “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.”) There is a deadpan, understated quality to his performers that also suggests puppetry, and he shows a stubborn reluctance to let story take precedence over style. So “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” which Mr. Anderson wrote with Noah Baumbach, and which he has been hoping to make for many years, is in some ways his most fully realized and satisfying film. — A. O. Scott, The New York Times
Fantastic Mr. Fox
- Brand: FOX Home Entertainment
- Released on: 2010-03-23
- Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
- Formats: AC-3, Animated, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
- Number of discs: 1
- Dimensions: .25 pounds
- Running time: 87 minutes
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Customer Reviews
Intelligent family filmaking; smart as a fox
Frankly, they had me by opening the movie with "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," which by the way, is mistakenly listed in the credits as performed by The Wellingtons. Actually it is the soundtrack version by the MelloMen, but I've seen it mislabeled elsewhere too. And the highly underrated "Love" from "Robin Hood." How nice.
The entire score is as unconventional as the film -- dominated by banjo and rhythm tracks to give it an "independent film" texture rather than the now-obligatory John Williams-type score (not that I don't love those scores too, this is just a fresh approach and avoids the modern factory film feel).
Even the titles are clever, all in keeping not only with a singular director's vision, but also very much in the Roald Dahl style. This particular book, by the way, is perhaps one of the most challenging to bring to film since it is one of the few Dahl stories without magical fantasy elements.
I think the overall takeaway, and the thread through all the other comments on this topic is -- intelligence. That's a prized commodity in so much of today's entertainment, animated or otherwise. This is a film as smart as a fox.
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