Enjoyable But Slightly Stilted Story Of Inventive Fox Vs Three Horrible Farmers

Rating: 5/10 (1 November 2009)

At the urging of his wife, Mr Fox renounces his life as a master thief. But when he moves into a new house adjoining the bloated farms of messrs Boggis, Bunce and Bean, the temptation to help himself proves too great
I think Wes Anderson is probably the wrong director to adapt Roald Dahl's classic children's book for the screen, but having said that this is a pretty good movie. Dahl's characters tend to be simple and strong - either very good or very bad - whereas Wes Anderson's are full of tics and neuroses. In the book, Mr Fox is simply a hero, whereas here he is part cuckold, part rebel narcissist, with a tendency to pontificate and an adolescent son with an inferiority complex. The problem throughout is that the movie is pitched too high - it should be designed for six-year-olds, but feels more like it's aimed at teenagers. The novel is too short to fill a movie, but the expansion into a three-act drama is quite successful, giving Mr and Mrs Fox a back-story and the three villainous farmers a dose of revenge as they flood the fox tunnels with Bean's cider and flush our heroes into the sewers. Where the movie really scores for me is in the quality of the animation, lensed by stop-motion expert Tristan Oliver. There are some amazing action scenes, great point-of-view tracks, daring close-ups of the animals' faces, and a beautiful sequence against the backdrop of a waterfall. Alexandre Desplat's rustic music is excellent, and there's a great song in the middle by Jarvis Cocker of Pulp fame. The voice cast are mostly good, with some flashy parts like Dafoe's scene-stealing turn as a beatnik jd-styled rat, but the casting is a bit odd; Wolodarsky is really a producer, Eric Anderson is the director's brother and Wes also voices a part, Hugo Guinness (Bunce) is a painter, director Garth Jennings has a part - what, weren't any real actors available ? The movie has some good scenes and enough laughs and I found myself warming to it towards the end, but it doesn't really capture the purity, wickedness and joie de vivre of Dahl's writing. For that, check out the two best film adaptations of his work - Nicolas Roeg's The Witches or Danny DeVito's Matilda.