Review of Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) by Louisa — 04 Dec 2009

A review for any people out there who wanted to see an animal movie: this is not it. To give some context for my review: I totally loved Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic.

For me (my sister violently disagrees) the Darjeeling Limited and its prequel, for all their magical sets and wonderful details, was just recycling the previous movies, and I found the Fantastic Mr. Fox, for all its amazing, unique animation, even more recycled.

For a movie all about delightful detail, why do we have an opossum in Britain? a pair of foxes with only one cub? beagles without a trace of beagleishness? a rat the size of a fox? The reason is that this is not a movie about animals, it is a movie about people, and in fact this is a movie about people we've already seen in previous Wes Anderson movies.

Several times I had an eerie (and not necessarily negative) feeling of deja vu, feeling that Anderson had literally recreated scenes from his live-action movies in puppet form. Roald Dahl is nowhere to be found ("The Fantastic Mr.

Fox," which I only read out of curiosity after finding the movie so un-Dahl-ish, was for me not anywhere near the top 10 best Dahl stories, but I was interested to see it was almost completely different in its sense of humor and its priorities--it was really about a fox, for one thing, not a human in a fox's clothing).

Anderson's characters' lack of animalness stands in sharp contrast to Pixar's recent terrific movie "Up," where the bird and dogs are wonderfully real and beast-like--even though clearly imaginary.