Fantastic is certainly the word for it, all right

Rating: 8/10 (4 April 2010)

For those who've grown just a wee bit tired of all those "family-friendly" animated features we've been inundated with over the years, I commend to you "Fantastic Mr. Fox," Wes Anderson's sly little creation that, for once, is aimed less at the kids in the audience than at the adults. Not that it is particularly crude or vulgar - it's certainly no "Fritz the Cat," and even the swearing is covered-over by the characters uttering a generic "cuss" - but its themes and dialogue are pitched at a generally higher level of sophistication than we are accustomed to in such works.
Based on a book by the beloved Roald Dahl, the story focuses on the dapper Mr. Fox, a recovering chicken thief who, at the behest of his wife, has given up his predatory ways in favor of domestic responsibility as a husband and father and a career as a newspaper columnist. What could be more respectable than that? But old habits die hard, and Mr. Fox soon discovers he must remain true to his carnivorous nature, leading him to enlist a few of his friends and neighbors of various species in a scheme to raid some local farms and make off with their poultry. This lands him and his buddies in hot water with both the owners of the farms and the heavily armed authorities who are called in to support them.
Like Anderson's live-action works, "Fantastic Mr. Fox" (co-written by Noah Baumbach) owes much of its charm to the scattered, random and quirky nature of the material and its presentation, with a narrative so full of side forays and offbeat, eccentric characters that the movie feels as if it's constantly renewing itself as it's going along. There is wonderful voice work by George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson and Willem Dafoe, clever in-joke references to spaghetti westerns and "Rebel Without a Cause," a funny subplot involving Fox's son and his obsession with proving his athletic prowess to his inattentive dad, and a simple, clean, streamlined look that combines a minimum of stop-motion movement with remarkably true-to-life backgrounds.
It may not be a great animated film, but it is one of the more original and refreshing ones we've come across in quite some time.