Review of Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) by Chads — 03 Dec 2009

Franklin Bean(Michael Gambon), a manufacturer of apple cider, is no Davy Crockett, but he, as well as his farmer friends, are not the men in black hats; are not in actuality, on closer inspection, the bad guys.

Unlike Crockett, who opposed the removal of Indians from their homestead, Bean wants the animals off his land. (Note: It's the wolf who's the stand-in for the Native American, not the meadow animals.

) Although it's only natural that you, the moviegoer, should side with the talking critters, don't overlook the fact that it's the foxes who start the war, in which the landowners are forced in a position to defend their respective livelihoods.

Interestingly enough, the filmmaker uses The Beach Boys' "Heroes and Villains" during a scene where Mr. and Mrs. Fox(voiced brilliantly by George Clooney and Meryl Streep) steal chickens.

The Brian Wilson-penned song calls into question the role of the foxes as either being heroes(the natural assumption made by the audience), or anti-heroes. Despite being adorable and wryly funny, they're undoubtedly the latter, as the sequence is preceeded by the opening scene's uncanny resemblance to the one in Fred Zinneman's "High Noon", where the posse of gunslingers congregate while being scored by a Tex Ritter ballad("Do Not Forsake Me").

There's a juxtaposition at work, as the song reflects the protagonist's desire to see "Frank Miller dead". Likewise, "Fantastic Mr. Fox" uses "The Ballad of Davy Crockett", and Davy Crockett is not Mr.

Fox: it's Bean. In both cases, the protagonist's song humanizes the villain. The filmmaker pays homage to the imagery in "High Noon" where one gunslinger is approached by his associate on horseback, as Mr.

Fox is joined by Mrs. Fox in a meadow before they they plunder a squab farm. The foxes are lovable, but they're thieves, and worse, don't have the excuse of being indigenous creatures, because they're civilized, a cut above the wild animals(like the wolf).

(The badger, played by Bill Murray, is an industrialist; he owns a flint mine.) Most notably, Kristofferson(voiced by Eric Chase Anderson), the foxes' charge, arrives by train, as Frank Miller does in the Gary Cooper film, and like the "High Noon" antagonist, this slightly effeminate visitor is targeted for death.

The filmmaker references this fact, arguably: Ash(voiced by Jason Schwartzman) owns a train set that he demonstrates for Kristofferson, which is followed by a cut to the actual train he arrived on.