Wes Anderson isn't exactly Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson or even Mike Judge. He has a following, but it isn't as big as Judge's. And he hasn't made any large films in the recent years that garnered $300 million dollars at the box office. He has made The Life Aquatic with Bill Murray, but it didn't make much cash or Oscars overall. Wes seems to have a fondness for animation if we're to go by some of the sequences in The Life Aquatic that were animated. His friend Henry Sellick directed those (and Coraline and the Nightmare Before Christmas), but here he comes forward as some kind of mad scientist in his lab. The result? A brilliant fare and one much better than expected.
In this film, Mr. Fox is having a mid-life crisis. He really wants to live it up soon. So he moves into a condo (or a tree) and decides to go pilfering, much to his wife's dismay. She figures he has enough troubles at home, like their only son who needs attention. However, when 3 angry farmers try to destroy the forest in search of Mr. Fox, all the critters realize Mr. Fox may be their only hope in surviving the onccoming war.
Now, admit it, that's not some ordinary film. This has to be one of the most mature films ever created, even surpassing Up, I freely admit. That is a plus. Also, the cast gigantic with the likes of George Clooney, Merryl Streep, William Dafoe and Jason Shwartzman in there. They all sound like their having fun and I think filming their voices outside in barns and underground helped get some authenticy in their voice work.
The biggest hurdles is the animation, but you get used to it after a while, tough goodness knows why they couldn't have spent a few bucks more and gotten better stuff.
The whole film feels like you are really in this forest because they all have nice qualities to their voices that makes you know them better. Since the actors are very talented, you get a sense of charisma, power or envy in their voices that makes them feel like realy people, something only Aardman and PIXAR seem to have cornered on the animation market before.
There are a few nitpicks though. For insatance, a few plot holes pop up now and then and it's very anooying that characters can't cuss. They just say cuss like "What the cuss?" You feel like Wes Anderson wants to make this a little more racy, yet the studio told him to stay put where he was.
This is, however, something that makes me realize the lgeacy that Wes Anderson has on cinema. He really makes great films that have real situations and now he's even transversed genre's to get into animation. He's broken barriers that we may not have even known were there.
Fantastic Mr. FOx is one of the year's best and really shows what animation has done this year. I take my hat off to Wes Anderson and Co. for coming thiiiiiiiiiss close to topping PIXAR in quality. Highly reccomended.
Rating: 9.2 out of 10 or A
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