Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox

After the suffocating production design and family dysfunction of Steve Zissou's The Life Aquatic (2004) and the serious melancholy in The Darjeeling Limited (2007), director Wes Anderson appears to have come out the other side reinvigorated. His latest movie, a nimble animated adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's book Fantastic Mr. Fox, is fast, loose, wildly inventive and more than a little exhilarating.

WhileFantastic Mr. Fox operates on many levels, it works especially well as a screwy caper movie.

After kicking things off with a framed photo of Dahl's book cover, Anderson introduces his hero, Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney), to the strains of The Ballad of Davy Crockett. A suave hepcat tricked out in a caramel corduroy suit, this fantastic creature resembles any number of smooth-talking Clooney characters except for the fact that he's embodied by a stop-motion puppet, whose artificial fur ripples and bristles while he struts about in the open air.

A rapid-fire bit of back story reveals that Mr. Fox is a gifted chicken thief, often aided by his freewheeling wife (Meryl Streep), who is happy to play Bonnie to his very foxy Clyde. All that changes when Mrs. Fox gets pregnant. The movie jumps 12 years into the future, at which point Mr. Fox has settled into something resembling responsibility, with a son, a newspaper column and a fancy new treehouse to his name.

One day, Mr. Fox dares to ask the question "Who am I?" This existential musing quickly leads him to wonder, "Can a fox be happy without a chicken in its teeth?" The itch festers, and with the properties of nasty farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean within view, Mr. Fox is soon enlisting his friend Kylie a zonked-out opossum with grey, petrified swirls for eyeballs to help him pull one last job at the henhouse.

While the Fantastic Mr. Fox operates on many levels, it works especially well as a screwy caper movie. In the grips of both midlife crisis and his own wild, animal nature, Mr. Fox assembles a bungling band of outsiders in bandit gear to pull off a "tripleheader" of heists. Gleeful anarchy ensues, and the funniest scenes involve the greasy, switchblade-toting Rat (Willem Dafoe), who has set his sights on Mrs. Fox.

It's only a matter of time before the angry farmers retaliate, brandishing rifles that emit clouds of glorious cotton-ball gunsmoke. And as Fox and gang are forced underground, Anderson burrows down into a strange, hermetic world of his own making. The subterranean hideout is production-designed to the hilt: There are bedrooms where kids play with tiny, ornate train sets, fully stocked kitchens in which the animals prepare bountiful feasts on miniature appliances and a candlelit dining room complete with a piano that Badger (Bill Murray) plays while everybody swills champagne.

This being a Wes Anderson film, there is also a family drama nestled between chapter headings, clever dialogue and colourful knick-knacks. Re-teaming with his Life Aquatic co-writer Noah Baumbach, the director condenses Dahl's four Fox children into one adolescent son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), who keeps getting lost in the long shadow cast by his swaggering, athletic father. Ash's tiny build makes him useless at the things Mr. Fox values most, an inadequacy that's underscored when his perfect cousin, Kristofferson (Eric Anderson), is quickly adopted into Mr. Fox's rag-tag thieving crew.

Though this fraught father-son dynamic all but sank The Life Aquatic, Anderson handles it with surprising maturity here. Mr. Fox might be a bit of a crook, but he's also more invested in his family than many of the fathers who've populated Anderson's previous pictures. He's not quite sure how to deal with klutzy Ash and his superhero cape, but he'd also die before turning the boy into an emotionally arrested adult along the lines of Ben Stiller in his Royal Tenenbaums tracksuit.

It's a subtle shift, but it feels momentous. Fantastic Mr. Fox isn't depressing in outlook it's a generous, big-hearted, sunny movie, and you can feel how much fun Anderson had making it. This warmth carries over to the colour palette, which is as rosy and golden as an autumn sunset. It's also there on the film's soundtrack many of the hijinks are set to upbeat Beach Boys tunes.

Most of all, it's there in these creatures, whose tongues and arms flail about in a flurry of jerky movements every time they scarf down a plate of food stolen from Boggis, Bunce and Bean. The stop-motion techniques used in Fantastic Mr. Fox are crude, but they have a playfulness to them that bests many of the flashy CGI tricks on offer in current animated fare.

As the Fantastic Mr. Fox progresses, these scruffy puppets grow to seem strangely human and entirely moving, and Anderson is careful to never let his signature style overwhelm the characters he so clearly loves. Mr. Fox and his pals spend a good part of the movie setting up new digs underground, but the resulting movie always feels lighter than air.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox opens Nov. 23.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBC News.