‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ grows old quickly

0

The films of Wes Anderson — among them The Royal
Tenenbaums
, Rushmore and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou — are the very definition of an acquired taste: You
either swoon over the director’s fussily art-directed images, his hipster-speak
dialogue, and his ’60s mod music soundtracks, or (like me) you want to hurl
heavy objects at the screen.

What’s notable about his latest, Fantastic Mr. Fox, based on the classic Roald Dahl children’s book, is
how readily Anderson’s style adapts to the style of stop-motion animation.
Imagine
The Darjeeling Limited
with talking fox heads on the actors’ bodies, and you’ll get a sense of this
occasionally amusing, mostly listless, quintessentially Anderson-ian effort.

George Clooney provides the voice of Mr. Fox, a lifelong
ne’er-do-well who — after nearly getting he and his wife (Meryl Streep) killed
— pledges to lead a more responsible life. But Mr. Fox’s wild streak is
uncontainable. He yearns to move from his foxhole to a nice tree located just a
stone’s throw away from the area’s three most violent, fox-hating farmers. Once
settled there, he can’t resist causing trouble and gobbling up more than his
fair share of chickens.

Filmed using miniature models that are posed and re-posed on
a soundstage, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a
deliberate throwback to a pre-CGI era — in classic hipster fashion, Anderson
prefers to do things old-school. But if the film is intriguing to look at for
its first 15 minutes — the spindly foxes whose hair seems to move with the
wind; the use of crinkling plastic to approximate rainfall — the images
steadily turn static, and the lack of expressiveness in the characters faces
makes it hard to get involved with them.

The bigger problem: Fantastic Mr. Fox isn’t nearly as funny and entertaining as it needs
to be. (The screenplay is by Anderson and
The Squid and the Whale writer-director Noah Baumbach.) As with many of
Anderson’s pictures, this one revolves around a self-absorbed parent and the
effect that has on his children — in this case young Ash (Jason Schwartzman),
who feels that his father favors his more athletic and popular cousin
Kristofferson (Eric Anderson).

There is something amusingly perverse about reconfiguring
Anderson brand of emo melancholy for the 8-year-old. Yet what little kid would
want to sit through (much less comprehend) such a self-conscious and affected
movie?

Fantastic Mr. Fox
builds to a climax in which Mr. Fox must gathers all his friends, including his
badger lawyer (Bill Murray) and his rabbit neighbor (chef Mario Batali, of all
people), to rescue Kristofferson, who has been kidnapped by those pesky
farmers. But there’s a limit to how much speed you can generate with
stop-motion animation.
Fantastic Mr. Fox jogs along when it needs to be sprinting to the finish line.

Much like in The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited,
the two low points in the Anderson canon, you can’t shake the feeling that
Anderson doesn’t really care about entertaining his audience. (He also doesn’t
care much about female characters; Mrs. Fox, like most of the women is his
films, is given nothing to do.) He’s mostly just locking himself inside his
hermetically-sealed universes and amusing himself.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

2 stars (out of 5)

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill
Murray

Running time: 87 minutes

Rated: PG (smoking, slang humor)

Christopher Kelly writes for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Via McClatchy-Tribune News Service.