One more heist, against his wife’s wishes
Fantastic Mr. Fox, released in 2009, is Wes Anderson’s stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1970 novel, co-written with Noah Baumbach after Anderson signed on partly because Dahl was one of his personal heroes growing up. Dahl’s original book supplies roughly the middle act of the finished film; Anderson added an entirely new beginning and end, including the extended fallout after the three farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean, respond to Mr. Fox’s renewed thefts by trying to bulldoze, then flood, his family’s entire underground community and everyone living near it. The film premiered as the opening selection of the BFI London Film Festival before its wider release that November.
Puppets built to look handmade
George Clooney voices Mr. Fox, a former thief who promises his wife, a role originally intended for Cate Blanchett before she left the project for undisclosed reasons, that he will give up stealing, and then resumes almost immediately once he settles his family into a grander, more visible tree overlooking the farmers’ land. Anderson recorded the voice cast outdoors, in a forest, an attic and a stable, before any animation began, and cinematographer Tristan Oliver and animation director Mark Gustafson built puppets, made by the firm Mackinnon and Saunders, that carry that loose, field-recorded quality into the finished, deliberately unpolished stop motion.
An autumn that never breaks colour
The film’s visual signature is a strict colour discipline: Anderson has said there is no single frame in the entire film without some shade of orange in it, an autumnal palette that holds the picture together even through long stretches that are mostly dialogue rather than action. Alexandre Desplat’s original score, nominated for an Academy Award alongside a BAFTA nomination, sits alongside a soundtrack of period pop and rock songs from acts including The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys, giving the film a sonic texture distinct from most animated features released the same year.
Where Dahl’s edge got smoothed
What the film trades away from Dahl’s novel is a sense of real danger. Critic Cosmo Landesman argued at the time that Anderson’s version loses the book’s whiff of genuine menace around child abuse and violence, and it is a fair complaint worth taking seriously: the three farmers are drawn as caricatures rather than credible threats, and the film never quite generates the feeling that anyone involved is in real peril, which noticeably flattens the stakes of what is nominally a siege plot against Mr. Fox’s whole community. Landesman went further, suggesting the film Americanises Dahl’s story simply by having its sympathetic animals speak with American accents while the villains keep theirs British.
A hole in the ground as a stand-in for identity
Underneath the heist plot is a simpler question the film keeps circling back to: whether Mr. Fox can accept being a settled, domesticated animal with a mortgage, a newspaper column and a family depending on him, or whether he needs to keep proving to himself that he is still fundamentally wild, even when that compulsion endangers everyone who depends on him for safety. Anderson lets the consequences of that compulsion register as genuinely costly, not simply a lesson Mr. Fox learns and then quietly discards by the credits, which gives the ending noticeably more weight than a straightforward caper film would.
Who should watch it
The film suits adults already fond of Anderson’s particular visual and verbal tics from his other work, and children old enough to sit comfortably with a drier, more composed sense of humour than most animated family films aim for. Younger viewers, or anyone expecting constant physical comedy and a quicker pace throughout, may find its more deliberate, talky rhythms harder to settle into than a typical family cartoon. It rewards patience rather than demanding constant engagement from its youngest possible viewers, and it plays better as a family film watched with an adult who can help explain the jokes about marriage and midlife restlessness.
An evening well spent, box office aside
At 87 minutes, Fantastic Mr. Fox underperformed financially on its initial release, taking $21 million domestically against a $40 million production budget, but its critical standing has only grown in the years since, with the New York Times and Rolling Stone both later placing it on their respective lists of the best films of the entire century. It is a short, visually distinctive way to spend an evening, and it rewards a second, closer viewing for its background detail alone, well beyond what the plot itself requires. It also won the Annecy Cristal for a feature film the following year, a recognition specific to the animation community that the box office numbers do not reflect.