Fantastic Mr. Fox Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

Fantastic Mr. Fox Blu-ray Movie Review

Where the other wild things are.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater March 25, 2010

For Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson, America’s premiere wunderkind auteurs, 2009 was the year of the inner child. Both brought children’s lit classics to the screen, Jonze turning Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are into an emotional voyage through the darker waters of childhood consciousness, and Anderson putting his indelible stamp—a Modern Library literariness, studied cinematic reflexivity, and impossibly hip music—onto Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. Despite the big furry monsters of Wild Things and the creaky stop-motion animation of Fantastic, neither film is that much of a stylistic departure for the idiosyncratic directors. Anderson’s films, in particular, have always strained for a kind of storybook quality, creating worlds that are ever so slightly off from the one we inhabit, worlds where conversations are always drolly intelligent, fathers absent and children precocious, where a naturalist’s ship might suddenly appear in cross-section, like an illustration, where a train might get lost on a track in the desert, and where a young, beret-wearing dramatist can stage a high school play about Vietnam, complete with massive explosions. Based on an actual storybook and shot with a fusty stop-motion aesthetic that’s a welcome change from the usual CGI kid-flick glossiness, Fantastic Mr. Fox allows Mr. Anderson to indulge his visual and thematic peculiarities in a way that seems much less affected. Critics have overused the titular F- word to describe the film, so I’ll stick with another F-adjective: fun.

The fantastic Mr. Fox...

Anderson and fellow writer Noah Baumbach—director of The Squid and the Whale—have expanded upon Roald Dahl’s comparatively slim volume by bookending it with sections of their own creation and filling out the story with Anderson’s usual father/son, husband/wife familial drama. Mr. Fox (George Clooney) is a newspaperman and erstwhile chicken thief who promises to give up the dangers of the coop-cracking life when he learns that his wife, Felicity (Meryl Streep), is with cub. Twelve (fox) years later, their surly, painfully awkward adolescent son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), competes for his father’s attention with his cousin Kristofferson Silverfox (Eric Chase Anderson), the sort of kid who can high dive, swing a bat, and hum a mantra with equal agility. Against the advice of his badger lawyer (Bill Murray), Mr. Fox moves his family into a tree house from which he can see the farms of Boggis, Bunce, and Bean (Michael Gambon), three ill- tempered poultry raisers—one fat, one short, one lean—who don’t take kindly to woodland creatures. Soon enough, Mr. Fox is back to his hutch-robbing antics, recruiting the help of Kylie Opossum (Wallace Wolodarsky) and the ultra-talented Kristofferson, much to Ash’s chagrin. The three farmers go to literally explosive lengths to get revenge, but meanwhile the Fox family is dealing with its own internal blowup, as Felicity begrudges her husband’s broken promise, and poor Ash, “too little and uncoordinated,” just wants to live up to his father’s expectations.

The voice acting is top notch, filled with life and character. Since the film is, in one sense, a very Ocean’s 11-style caper, George Clooney seems perfectly cast as Mr. Fox, playing him as a man…sorry, a fox of both action and sophistication, a kind of latter-day mammalian Cary Grant. Meryl Streep, who sometimes sounds conspicuously like Anderson mainstay Angela Houston, is preternaturally wise as hip mama fox Felicity—painting landscapes crisscrossed with lightning bolts—and Schwartzman is by turns scrappy and peeved, dejected and determined. The surrounding oddballs and grumps are cast with Anderson’s usual specificity. Though Michael Gambon is deliriously wicked as mean old Franklin Bean, and Owen Wilson turns up briefly to coach Whack-Bat—a parody of cricket’s incomprehensible rules—the best bit part goes to Willem Defoe as a seedy-looking security rat who wields a switchblade and snaps his fingers like a Westside Story gang member. One wonders if it was fate or merely coincidence that in 2009, Mr. Defoe was cast in two movies that feature talking foxes, this one and Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, which is most definitely not a kid-friendly film.

Like Where the Wild Things Are, Fantastic Mr. Fox seems primed more for wistful adults, nostalgic for a childhood spent under the covers with a book and a flashlight, than children who are just learning how to read. The film’s russet and gold color palette practically smells of old paperbacks, its arts ‘n’ crafts sets and handmade, fur-covered creations are reminiscent of the dioramas you made for elementary school book reports. (Except mine were always made of Lego characters and clay, inside a shoebox with one side cut out.) Essentially, it’s like taxidermy come to herky-jerky life, with bristling hair, porcelain eyes, and the most detailed dollhouse dress-up clothes imaginable. There are enough antics to keep most kids interested—break-ins and bust- outs, battles pitting gun-toting humans against small mammals tossing flaming pinecone grenades—but it's the parents in the audience who will wear wry smiles after catching the jokes that fly right over the heads of the youngsters. Anderson’s characters nearly always speak in arch, quasi-literary language, like castoffs from some abandoned Salinger novel, and the tone is kept just as crackling here, with dry as kindling dialogue that sparks into flame for a few good laughs. (See the repeated use of the word “cuss” in place of actual “cuss” words, as in, “Like cuss you will,” or, “This is going to be a total cluster-cuss for everybody.”)

Along with all the wisecracks and woodland shenanigans, Fantastic Mr. Fox carries some weighty and emotionally complex themes, especially considering the vapidity of most purported children’s entertainment. Mr. Fox goes through what amounts to a mid-life crisis and the Mrs. seems on the verge of filling for divorce. One character even redeems himself in death, to which another replies, “Redemption, sure, but in the end he’s just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant.” That’s some cruel existentialism for a kid’s movie, but if I think back to the books and films that influenced me most as a child, I was always drawn to the ones that seemed right on the hazy border of my ability to understand them. And I’m sure that’s true for most kids, who are always testing the boundaries of the unknown. Though the fantastic fox of the title is Clooney’s bird-thief, we’re meant to identify most with his son Ash, a character to which adults and littler people can both relate. Individuality, the acceptance of being different, the inherent tension and awkwardness of father/son relationships—it’s all standard-issue Wes Anderson stuff, but in the carefully manufactured world of Fantastic Mr. Fox it feels newer and truer somehow. Who’d have imagined the director’s penchant for stagy, storybook artifice would be most purely distilled in a stop-motion Roald Dahl adaptation?

Fantastic Mr. Fox Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

In three words, very nearly perfect. You'd have to be grumpier than Boggis, Bunce, and Bean combined to nitpick about Fantastic Mr. Fox's faithful 1080p/AVC-encoded presentation. Shot with Nikon D3 digital still cameras and given a digital-to-digital transfer—which seems strange to say considering how analog the characters and sets look—Fox is a thing of handmade beauty on Blu-ray. The source is pristine and very nearly noiseless, the product of shooting with controlled lighting using arguably one of the best full-frame DSLRs on the market. The lenses are where the image quality really comes from, though, and the Nikon and Cooke glass used here results in an ultra-crisp picture that not only impresses on its own merits, but also makes you stop and marvel at the incredibly intricate work of the puppet makers and production artists. Every detail is available for our inspection—the individually definable pieces of fur, the texture of Mr. Fox's corduroy coat, and all the particulars of the miniature props and lavish sets. The film's autumnal palette of golds, yellows, oranges and browns is also immaculately reproduced, with blacks that are deep and never hazy, and shadow delineation that's sublime. The technical encode is almost flawless as well, with no errant artifacts or other compression-related problems. There's some slight, borderline unnoticeable banding in a few of the background skies, but it's barely worth mentioning. Fans of stop-motion animation will likely go slack-jawed over this one, as you get the feeling that what you're seeing looks exactly as it's intended to be seen.

Fantastic Mr. Fox Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

While not as immediately impressive as the picture quality, Fantastic Mr. Fox's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is a winner as well. Honestly, considering the nature of the film, I was expecting a livelier, more immersive mix, so I was a bit surprised when my rear speakers only piped up three or four times throughout, mostly for music and the occasional sound effect, like a crumbling wall of dirt. That said, the audio experience is not without its charms, including a wide spread across the front channels, a solid dynamic range, Wes Anderson's characteristically specific musical choices—the Beach Boys, Jarvis Cocker, Art Tatum—and some of the best voice acting I've heard in an animated film in a long time. One of the things that makes a huge difference in the performances is that, instead of cooping his actors one at a time in some sound-proofed ADR studio, Anderson had many of the stars act together, and recorded much of the dialogue in and around an English farmhouse, capturing quiet ambient noise along with the voices. The effect is a track with lots of warmth and personality, even if it doesn't have the whiz-bang-pow cross-channel theatrics of other animated titles.

Fantastic Mr. Fox Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Making Mr. Fox Fantastic (1080p, 44:48)
While I would've loved a commentary track with, say, Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, and Roald Dahl's wife, I'll settle for this excellent six-part "making of" documentary, which demonstrates just how much of an undertaking the production of Fantastic Mr. Fox actually was. The Look of Fantastic Mr. Fox is an explanation of how the filmmakers arrived at Mr. Fox's handmade, organic aesthetic, while Script to Screen details the development of a one-act story into a full length screenplay—here we also see Wes Anderson acting out scenes from the film for the animators to use for reference. In The Puppet Makers, production designer Nelson Lowry and chief puppet creator Andy Gent take us into the workshop where all of the miniatures were made, and later, in Still Life (Puppet Animation), we see the animators doing their tedious work. Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray show up in The Cast to say a few words about their characters, and we also get some behind-the-scenes footage of George Clooney and Bill Murray recording their dialogue at an English farmhouse. Lastly, Bill and His Badger is a brief segment with the always-entertaining Murray touring the film's miniature sets. Do note that you hit "play all," or select each sequence individually.

A Beginner's Guide to Whack-Bat (1080p, 1:12)
"So, you want to play Whack-Bat? Here's how," begins this short animated explanation of the rules of every woodland creature's favorite cricket-cribbing pastime.

Fantastic Mr. Fox: The World of Roald Dahl (1080i, 3:00)
A kind of ultra condensed version of the making of documentary, focusing on how Wes Anderson drew from the life of Roald Dahl himself, even to the point of recreating Dahl's office as Mr. Fox's office in the film.

Theatrical Trailer (1080p, 2:27)

Fantastic Mr. Fox Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Fantastic Mr. Fox is likely to be divisive amongst Anderson's Franny and Zooey- toting acolytes, but this is certainly the most mainstream audience-friendly film the director has made yet, without sacrificing any of his visual specificity and cult charm. Less for kids and more for the kid in all of us, Fox will appeal most directly to once and future bookworms, Roald Dahl readers, and fans of stop-motion animation. Does the film look fantastic on Blu-ray? Cuss yes it does. Highly recommended.