Wes Anderson, you know, for kids!

So here it is.

After years of work, and since Wes mentioned about Life Aquatic's stop motion fish that he wanted to work on a full feature in the style, he made it.

Filmed in the heart of the story, England, and featuring actual British actors as the humans, and Americans/Canadians for animals, we have Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox, as written by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach. Now, to comprehend this film through my terms you need to understand where I'm coming from.

I've grown up from 10 to 19 on Anderson's portfolio, Rushmore, Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic, Darjeeling, Bottle Rocket, and as such have become one with his quirky, smart witty style of comedy, alongside Noah Baumbach, who I first became familiar with through Life Aquatic during a second viewing at 3 am, where the film really becomes pertinent. And subsequently second viewing of The Squid and The Whale made me adore that film, you can watch it again and again and each time focus one one character/team, brilliant. Margot at the Wedding was not the disaster everyone proclaimed, it was just even darker and leftfield than Squid.

So I'm up to snuff on these most awesome of indie movie makers, so imagine my surprise when I read the end credits and find it's not Anderson alone, ala Darjeeling, but with Baumbach that he co-wrote Mr. Fox, a film that is odd in all the wrong ways.

Yes the film looks great, has a homely charm indeed, but the characters are completely hollow and soulless, and with George Clooney and Meryl Streep's voices clearly too slick and American for the image, the film doesn't work on the vocal level. What about in humour? It's gonna be surreal, odd and yet human, right? No. No, instead of funny but true family problems we get 'cuss' as a running gag to replace fuck, shit and hell. To be fair it offers one of the film's two gags, in clustercuss.

But the only other gag is that Badger, Bill Murray in a very small role, has a mac behind him with post-its on it. That's it.

Who the film is made for is confusing as it's too wordy and complex for younger kids, not enough action and adventure for older kids, nothing vulgar for the teens and not smart enough for adults, they take their gags that aren't funny and instead of being patronising with them, run them into the ground or spell them out. It's not right, it's not what solid filmmaking and humour is about.

And the worst part about this film? It's 87 minutes and the film starts off feeling like it's going to have a lot of goings on, then about 2 reels in the main plot has been underway for ages, and the main plot is Mr. Fox wants to eat more chickens and feel rich, then he pisses off the farmers and puts all animals in the shit. And that's it, there's some unfunny, odd grenade and shooting sequences, but that's all the action, and the scope is so narrow it's almost no need to be animated, coulda just used real animals and got the same lack of emotions out of it.

I say this as an aficionado, the film is awful, truly awful, and it's sad that this is the case.
Avoid.
2/10