Fantastic Mr. Fox

City Paper Grade: A

by Shaun Brady

[ City Paper Grade: A ]

The thing that continually saves Wes Anderson's films from the stifling archness threatened by his fussy stylization is the messiness of the lives that he packs into those symmetrical storybook frames. Adapting Roald Dahl's zippy parable, Anderson shifts his usual method into reverse; where he normally dresses psychological wounds in cartoon colors, here he stuffs a vivid kid's story with a touch of raw feeling, the way the story's Mr. Bunce injects goose livers into doughnuts.

For all their cuddly charm, Anderson restores a core wildness to his anthropomorphized critters, as they claw viciously into family dinners or bare fangs and growl during friendly disagreements. As always, Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach are interested in the savagery at the heart of humanity, exposed here overtly in the war of attrition between the nasty humans and the clever, charming woodland creatures, but even more so in the animals' typically untidy family dynamics.

Like Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, Anderson's film takes its source as a childhood memory underlying very adult emotions. Mr. Fox (voiced, almost necessarily, by George Clooney in Danny Ocean mode) has promised his wife (Meryl Streep) to give up his chicken-thieving ways, but can't resist slipping back into his instinctual habits, thus precipitating a standoff with a triumvirate of evil farmers. He's another too-charming manchild in the Anderson canon, one who has finally grown up enough to find a family but can't bring himself to quit gnawing at those old wild oats.

The impact is felt most keenly on his son, a clever misfit voiced, inevitably, by Jason Schwartzman, who is shown up by the arrival of an athletically gifted cousin (the director's brother, Eric Anderson). The story unfolds in a joyfully ragged dollhouse world, crammed with detail and the candy-colored anachronisms that fill Anderson's invented universe.