The Filmcake

November 30th – December 6th

Fantastic Mr. Fox – After the letdown that was The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson returns with an animated tour de force. I need to see it a few more times (the same goes, admittedly, for Darjeeling), but this one very well may end up for me as Anderson’s best. While I have no familiarity with Roald Dahl’s book upon which this was based, I think Anderson and company have done a remarkable job. They have perfectly combined the nostalgia of stop-motion animation with the quirkiness that make up the Wes Anderson canon. It’s a stop-motion form that suggests nostalgia for those 1980′s weekend mornings catching Ray Harryhausen’s delightful animation for Clash of the Titans on television. And Anderson’s familiar style shines through in a way that is not overly twee. I’m already a Wes Anderson devotee, but it certainly seems he finally nails it with this mix of nostalgia and quirk. The twee works better here than it has in any of his previous work.

Like with Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are, this is one movie I absolutely cannot wait for on Blu-ray with some sort of Criterion Collection treatment. I can’t wait to pour over commentary and production diaries and featurettes. This is a world I cannot wait to dive into more deeply. The puppetry, miniaturized costumes, and set decoration have absolutely caught my imagination.

I also think there is some pretentiously affected, yet tongue-in-cheek essay to be written analyzing this animated feature with Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. I mean, c’mon, they both have foxes. They both contain a disturbing Willem Dafoe. They both feature dismemberment of some sort. Man’s role within nature, man’s inherent sinful nature, blah, blah, blah…

In the meantime, there’s this mashup.

Upon further research, I am surprisingly fascinated by the role of the fox in literature. I was completely unaware of the relevance of the Reynard literary cycle with the fox character as trickster. The original Dahl story for Fantastic Mr. Fox and even Disney’s 1973 version of Robin Hood owe to this literary tradition (man, I really want to see Disney’s Robin Hood again…it’s been too long). Ladislas Starevich’s The Tale of the Fox (Le Roman de Renard) from around 1930 features the Reynard cycle done with puppet animation. A truly amazing animated feature, The Tale of the Fox certainly was an inspiration for Wes Anderson’s cinematic retelling of the Dahl story. The look of the animals, some of the scenery, and even some of the humor must have been borrowed from this Starevich film. If you end up loving Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox as I did, you should certainly check out this older gem (which can presently be found on YouTube — it begins with Part 1 [of 6]):