FANTASTIC MR FOX
London Film Festival and general release

Like many of Roald Dahl’s stories for children, Fantastic Mr Fox (1970) is a tale of the poor and dispossessed outwitting the powerful and cruel. Dependent on poaching chickens from humans for his livelihood, Mr Fox eventually devises a ruse to beat the capitalist hegemony from within, burrowing under the sheds of three wicked farmers to create a society in which food is freely available for all. But Dahl was no Marxist and the book’s conclusion is built on bourgeois aspiration. Fox’s brave new world will be a bastion of suburban and class order:

“We will make,” said Mr Fox, “a little underground village, with streets and houses on each side – separate houses for Badgers and Moles and Rabbits and Weasels and Foxes. And every day I will go shopping for you all.”

Wes Anderson’s new adaptation (co-written with Noah Baumbach) is wedded to the ideals of the American Dream, but that is no betrayal of Dahl’s original. Anderson is playful with his subject, and the film contains all the hip wit and stylistic exuberance of his previous ventures, such as The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) or The Life Aquatic, with Steve Zizou (2004). The old-fashioned stop motion animation is filled with snappy dialogue, camp vignettes, whimsical psychodrama and schmaltz, much of it self-conscious. It also has a well-chosen soundtrack and looks fantastic, thanks to Mark Gustafson and his team of animators.

In Anderson’s version, as in Dahl’s, Mr Fox (George Clooney) is a responsible family man. He lives with his wife (Meryl Streep) and only son (Jason Schwartzman) in a gemütlich den, in which he writes a column for the local rag. They are poor(ish) but happy, and there is passion in the marriage. But with Fox’s filching days behind him (a promise to his wife), life also seems a little staid. Fox responds by upgrading the family manor (“I don’t want to live in a hole any more”), yet still something isn’t right. “Who am I?”, he asks himself.

The answer is, at least in part, a feral beast: Fox misses the chase. Roping his nephew and opossum friend into his midlife crisis, Fox embarks on a poaching frenzy. This is stealing from the rich for the sheer hell of it, the territory of a later, and darker, Dahl story, Danny the Champion of the World. But his spree has a moral consequence: the result of Mr Fox’s erring is to endanger his family and the rest of the fossorial society. The vile farmers seek to flush the creatures out. Mrs Fox is not impressed; her husband tries to analyse his drives: “I think I have this thing where I want everyone to think I’m the greatest”.

Fox loses his tail to the farmers, but despite this part-emasculation remains a leader of animals, and regains respect by devising the subterranean system of pilfering. This, by and large, is where the book ends, but Anderson then heads out on his own, expanding Dahl’s story into a saga of fathers and sons, complete with a kidnap-and-rescue mission, a Western-style showdown, and a hi-tech Special Unit operation in which each animal has his own specialism. Difference is loudly applauded, but some beasts still need to prove themselves. Fox’s son, Ash, a malcoordinated weakling, has spent his life in the shadow of his fantastic father, and when his sporty, karate-kicking cousin arrives, Fox is impressed. Ash must work to win back his father’s approval and does so in a daring stunt that ends with him reacquiring the paternal tail. Ash’s Freudian foolhardiness echoes his father’s, torn between the life of a domestic salary fox and that of “a wild animal”. We are reminded of the latter whenever Fox eats and when he bonds with a wolf (Fox’s own benchmark for the feral) – and when Mrs Fox, at the end, reveals she is pregnant. “Foxes from your side of the family take unnecessary risks”, sniffs Ash’s cousin. And that, of course, is what makes them so foxy.

Fantastic Mr Fox is enlivened by voicings from Clooney, Streep and Schwartzman, as well as from Bill Murray as Fox’s wary lawyer and Willem Dafoe as the cider-swilling rat. It is not without its share of cliché. The film is set (in part) in the American South and the three farmer baddies are, perhaps inevitably, English. Of these, Michael Gambon steals the show as Farmer Bean, supported by Jarvis Cocker as his banjo-twanging sidekick (Cocker has supplied a jaunty new song). The jokes are sharp and child-friendly (“it’s a total cluster cuss”) and if some of the tension from the book has been lost (Anderson makes curiously little of the foxes’ hunger during their siege) then there are other gains. Not the least of these is a twist in the suburban spirit of Dahl’s original. Abandoning the farms, Mr Fox finds a new place to take his family for dinner: a gleaming, anodyne, after-hours supermarket. Renouncing Bean’s special cider that had so enlivened their underground dinner parties, the foxes celebrate with fun-for-all-the-family restraint: by collectively glugging back several cartons of apple juice.

Toby Lichtig is a freelance writer and editor living in London.

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