It's one of the best films of the year, if not the best

Rating: 9/10 (8 December 2009)

Like the pairing of Werner Herzog and Nic Cage in the new Bad Lieutenant movie, the combination of director Wes Anderson and writer Roald Dahl seems, in hindsight, like a no-brainer. Peanut butter and jam, scotch and soda. Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson's stop-motion adaptation of Dahl's beloved book of the same name seems from its opening frames to be an absolute classic. It's one of the best films of the year, if not the best, and more fun by miles than anything I've seen in years.
George Clooney and Meryl Streep voice Mr. and Mrs. Fox, who move into a new tree-home near the farms of three cruel farmers. Their son, the diminutive Ash (Jason Schwartzman) is dismayed at both his inability to match the legendary athletic prowess of his dashing father and at the arrival of a cousin, Kristofferson (Eric Anderson). Mr. Fox, who gave up life as a chicken thief when he married, is drawn back into a life of fox-crime, but his actions have repercussions when farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean (Robin Hurlstone, Hugo Guinness and Michael Gambon) seek retribution and lay siege to Fox's den.
Anderson's films from Bottle Rocket through The Royal Tennenbaums and The Life Aquatic have followed a pretty linear progression as he's become more and more the auteur: heavily stylized (to the point in his recent work of distraction) ensemble pieces about smart, odd, fracturing middle-class families, with rock music from the '60's. The problem is that as his work has progressed, it has gotten harder and harder to read his characters as in any way authentically human. That is not to say that his later films suffer in comparison, just that they're so heavily stylized and so odd that while they're dazzling displays of cohesive style and wit and meticulous planning, they lack the ram-shackle humanist charm that made his early films stand out. His later films seem less about humans than weird human simulacra that live in a weird sea-going commune or in a New York with a 375th St. YMCA.
In the stop-motion animated world of Mr. Fox Anderson's stylistic quirks lose their distancing surreality and become instead marvels, utter naturalistic joys. It's a sublime pairing, and it highlights what has always been Anderson's true strength: his writing. It's funny, scary and moving, and like Dahl's work it retains its feel of coming intact from kid-land with all of the loopiness and anarchic joie-de-vivre that entails. Hilariously funny and with as much depth as any grown-up film made this year, it's not just fun and funny, it's a spectacularly well-made film. 9.2/10.