Tangled Up In Wires

If nothing else, 2009 has been a stellar year for animation. Sure there was Up but Coraline and Ponyo showed that Pixar aren’t the only people doing extraordinary things with cartoons. We can now add Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox to the list. Bearing Anderson’s distinctive directoral stamp, which meshes perfectly with Roald Dahl’s authorial sensibilities, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a joyful movie of meticulous, fully realized detail, a triumph of style and heart.

The film’s larky plot concerns Mr. Fox, who has the distinctive voice of George Clooney. Mr. Fox was a successful chicken thief who hung it all up to settle down with a wife and child. However, when he moves to a new tree, in the same neighborhood as the three most successful and dangerous farmers in the world, he can’t resist the temptation of one last big score. When he gets into more trouble than he bargained for, Mr. Fox has to use all his cunning and wiles to get his community out of a big jam.

Here’s the part where I have to admit that, despite my trepidation going in, I may not be the best person to evaluate this movie with a detached eye, since it happens to fall directly in my happy zone. Based on a Roald Dahl novel? He was and still is one of my favorite authors. Directed by Wes Anderson? Check. With a soundtrack that includes classic, but not overplayed songs from the 1950s and 1960s? You betcha. If only this film could include Bill Murray, playing a lawyer/badger…which it totally does.

The blending of Wes Anderson’s trademark style with Roald Dahl’s source material works even better that it sounds on paper. Anderson’s choice to make the film in stop-motion animation was perfect. Unlike “Coraline,” whose stop-motion was seamless and state-of-the-art, Fantastic Mr. Fox is affectionately rendered in jittery, hand-crafted stop-motion, reminiscent of the old Rankin-Bass holiday cartoons like Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Raindeer. In an interview, Anderson said he shot the film at 12 frames-per-second, instead of the traditional 24, which adds to the charm, especially when the characters dance (which is more often than you may think). Anderson’s eye and command really come through too. For anyone who doubts the impact a director can have in animation, I point you to this film, which looks and feels exactly like a Wes Anderson movie. All the trademarks are there, from his square, dead-center framing to crafted, exacting mise-en-scene.

And, like any Wes Anderson movie, there’s a dollup of melancholy to go with all the whimsy. But, that said, he’s working from a slightly different angle than usual. Mr. Fox isn’t the typical Anderson protagonist, instead suffering from angst that more closely approximates general male anxiety. He has settled down with a job (writing a column for the newspaper that nobody reads) and a family, but has trouble squaring his bourgeois, middle-class lifestyle with the literal animal lurking inside him. Anderson balances the two elements, bringing out the characters’ wild sides in a few delightful moments, while also mining a lot of humor from a group of animals who go to elementary school and see the pediatrician.

For me, the movie is most purely encapsulated by its best scene, one that rivals the prank war from “Rushmore;” in it the camera remains stationary, fixed on a bank of security monitors each with a different angle. Mr. Fox starts on the monitor on the left and works his way across each one, as he moves through each step of his elaborate heist. It’s a moment representative of the meticulousness and the total command of filmmaking that makes this movie such a joy to watch. Each frame is packed with detail, made more tactile thanks to excellent work by the animators. The entire film has the feel of an elementary school diorama in a shoebox and, if it’s a little slight, then so what. My friends and I left the film wondering if we could immediately turn around and go see it again. Mr Fox inhabits a world that you want to live in, and the only problem is that you have to leave it after an all-too-brief 87 minutes.

Jonah’s Score: 88

Tangled Up in Wires Grade: A