Domestic Animals
by Giampaolo Bianconi
The Fantastic Mr. Fox, dir. Wes Anderson (2009)
It’s been widely remarked that, in a sense, Wes Anderson has been making animated films all along: consider the seeds of his kid-in-a-candy-store stylizations in Bottle Rocket, the prep-school pretensions of Rushmore, the whole-hearted storybook sentimentality of The Royal Tenenbaums; through to The Life Aquatic’s more playful and adventurous scenarios and The Darjeeling Limited’s barely-there characters and overpopulated, super-symmetrical frames. Anderson’s pop-baroque style necessitates that he take a heavier-than-heavy hand in the design of his films, culminating perhaps in his collaboration with Louis Vuitton on the animal-print suitcases for Darjeeling. Animation, then, gives Anderson the opportunity to exert near-total control on this film: not only the shots and performances, but every set, object, and character was cut from whole cloth to Anderson’s specifications. The Fantastic Mr. Fox, though, was animated in London, while Anderson spent most of the shoot in Paris, issuing commands via a barrage of emails, telephone calls, and other fiber optic channels. He literally phoned this one in.
The narrative, by now, is painfully familiar: the tale of a megalomaniacal patriarch on a mission is the plot of every Anderson film, despite the details that embellish them. Were it not for George Clooney voicing the titular Mr. Fox, I would have guessed that Anderson had simply pasted together fragments of dialogue from his previous films. The only other newcomer, Meryl Streep as Mrs. Fox, manages to sound so much like Angelica Houston that she blends right into Anderson’s troupe of familiar players.
To be sure, there’s something exciting here: the film’s claymation and fur has a sumptuous texture, and the jittery movements of the figures becomes beautiful to watch. I loved the way the characters danced, dug, and ate: there was a real joy in the peripatetic camera and how it complemented the equally kinetic characters. Aesthetically, like many of Anderson’s films, Mr. Fox manages to dazzle almost as much as an ornately decorated room in Versailles. In The Fantastic Mr. Fox, it’s not the over-produced visuals that make it seem so empty on the inside: the fact that the film is animated makes its aesthetics not only excusable, but also fresh and impressive.
What makes the film so vapid is its outstanding cynicism. Does Anderson really think we won’t mind the same old story, just because—you know—he does it so well? Does he think that putting some stringy music behind an unemotional, out of the blue confrontation between Mr. and Mrs. Fox will tug at our heartstrings? Does he think no one will bat an eyelash because the farmers are Brits and the animals are American–just chalk it up to “quirk?”
When Jean-Luc Godard ridiculed Hollywood conventions, he did so blatantly and with a serious attempt at critique. Watching The Fantastic Mr. Fox, one gets the sense that Anderson is content merely to savor the irony of such conventions: he makes them apparent only to revel in them, engendering the film with an unbearable sense of futility.
This cynicism peaks at the end of the film, when Fox and his family bust into a neon-lit grocery store to fetch some dinner. Mr. Fox delivers a rousing speech: this food might be fake, he says, but by golly are we going to eat it. We’re going to keep surviving, he tells them triumphantly. We’re wild animals, he says. Then they dance and the camera zooms out the window of the supermarket, which is owned by the same three farmers Mr. Fox has spent the whole film battling. It’s not a hard pill to swallow, thanks to the soft music and the sumptuous visuals. But that’s precisely the problem: Mr. Fox and his family come to realize that no matter the stiffening, recognizably false world they’re trapped in, they’ll just keep on truckin’ like the wild animals they are. It’s what makes one of the film’s final gestures–Mr. Fox’s fist-raising show of solidarity with a majestic and distant wolf–so profoundly uninspired.