Modest, lovely, entertaining

Rating: 8/10 (12 January 2010)

I came to this with an open mind and had none of the misgivings that some others brought with them.
I know there are people out there who knew 'The Fantastic Mr. Fox' in book form, but I'd never heard of it, and I'd read a lot of Roald Dahl, particularly the short stories. The film's setting is clearly Home Counties England, somewhere between Reading and Cheltenham, but the half-Norwegian Dahl was such an Americanized writer that I never really thought of him as really English, so I had no problem with the American actors who played the animals.
The charm of the film is in its unpretentious sets and its refusal to engage in grand themes. That movie-trailer scene of Clooney/Foxy looking at the stars and wondering why he's a fox and not a badger--that seems to be joke about all overwrought film scripts. The film ends with a dance in a supermarket--what could be less pretentious or more open-ended? I do feel it is a shame that more couldn't be done with Meryl Streep as Mrs. Fox. She has nothing to do but stand around and be the wary, censorious wife. Most of the other characters are variants of the Wes Anderson stock company we've been looking at since 'Bottle Rocket,' and that's fine with me, but it makes the characterization flatter than it needs to be. The most exciting character is Willem Dafoe's rat, who never gets a chance to develop.
Still, it's all very pleasant and technologically interesting, without ever hitting you over the head with techno-innovations and philosophical pain. That's charming enough in itself.