Fantastic Mr. Fox

Directed by: Wes Anderson

Written by: Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbauch, based on the book by Roald Dahl

Featuring the Voices of: Eric Chase Anderson, George Clooney, Willem Dafoe, Michael Gambon, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Meryl Streep, & Owen Wilson

The whole time I was watching this film I just wanted to reach out and touch the characters. This is the magic of classic stop-motion animation. Unlike CG animation, where the fur may look just as soft but lacks the tangibility, stop-motion has an earthy, unpolished look, reminiscent of the original King Kong or Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer or Yoda before his digital make-over.

Wes Anderson is a very talented director. Take a look at the shots in his films and notice the color palettes. Every scene has been deliberately painted with rich colors, turning an ordinary shot into a visual feast. If you watch any behind the scenes footage or take a look at the breathtaking book, The Making of Fantastic Mr. Fox, you'll know that Wes Anderson has that obsessive attention to detail characteristic of great directors. He'll repaint a set just to get it to that exact perfect shade of crimson, or make notes next to character sketches to 'add ribbing to the sweater,' 'adjust the angle of the shoulders,' 'make the fingers a little longer and finer.' It pays off.

For this film, Anderson combines his three dimensional stop-motion characters and sets with the occasional two dimensional backdrop, providing a decidedly picture-book feeling, as though you really are watching the characters in a children's book pop up from their 2-D page and come to life.

The characters here will be familiar to anyone who's seen any of Anderson's previous films (as will many of the voices as well). There's the over-confident, deluded but hopelessly charming wanna-be criminal, Mr. Fox (voiced by Clooney), his insecure, quirky but lovable son Ash, and a host of other characters, full of personality and real-life idiosyncrasies, hardly expected of children's book characters. The plot is fun and provides for plenty of strange and amusing situations. This is one of those few films that will likely be enjoyed more, or at least as much, by adults as children. Anderson's style certainly compliments Dahl's, and this film makes apparent just how much the two are cut from the same artistic cloth.