on the favorite book of my childhood: Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox. After all these years, with screen adaptations of various quality from various books coming out, one of the best children's fantasy stories ever penned made it to theaters.(Pardon me if this sounds like a review column...in some ways it is, but it'll be getting down to some pretty basic principles of mine too.)
The reviews I saw over the past several weeks made me even more enthusiastic about it: universal raves for the quality of the animation (with more than a few up-yours-Pixar! thrusts, which struck me as odd), the quality of the voicing (particularly George Clooney as Mr. Fox), and the clever adaptation of the plot.
I'll say that the first two counts are right as rain. The animation--stop-motion dolls, and even the individual strands of fur are manipulated expressively--is impeccably good. One of the tenets of animation is that everything is slightly ridiculous. There can be beauty and majesty in a scene, but there needs to be corresponding awkwardness and sloppiness and missing detail--deliberately.
Any Calvin & Hobbes fans will be with me on this, though you might not realize it. Go through
one of Watterson's old books, and find one of those really impressive tableaus he was so well known for, like a Jurassic jungle, or a desert landscape, or simply some trees. The landscape is gorgeous, drawn and colored with precision. But then look carefully at Calvin and his tiger within the scene: the colors cross the lines, Hobbes' stripes don't stay within the boundaries of his own body, and Calvin has three fingers on each hand. Even within the characters, the 
mouth and eyes are drawn with superb expressiveness, sometimes in huge contrast with the sloppiness of the clothes, hands or tail. Obviously it's not because Watterson can't draw well enough, that the characters are so sloppy. It's to keep them as cartoons, intentionally silly and unrealistic. Too much accurate detail in his comic protagonists would diminish their comic value.
So in Fantastic Mr. Fox, when Mrs. Fox comes walking in an abnormally fast, strangely upright, and pretty unnatural posture across the hills to her husband in the opening scene, it helps establish the unreality of it all, and confirms that these are really cartoons we're looking at, and are supposed to be strange and funny. And every scene thereafter, where the animation looks blocky and awkward, confirms and deepens the comic cartoonish unreality. On top of that, the level of detail is captivating, where even the air swishing Kristofferson's fur as he dives from the tree branch into the water, is funny and unreal. I was amazed at how many facial close-ups there were of various characters, but especially the Foxes. And they worked. Especially the foxes--whose fur appeared wind-tossed, and expressively so, even inside small closed caverns--were both touching and funny. I can't praise the animation highly enough. Every different animation style, whether styles of drawing, or computer animation, or models, like these--represents, you might say, a different theory on how to portray figures and the world.Going a bit farther afield here, but in the (now old, I guess) Cartoon Network show Ed, Edd & Eddie (which annoyed me but I still watched occasionally), every single line, every object including the sun, the ground and the houses, seemed to have nervous, shifting, jittery outlines which were never entirely steady. And these jiggling outlines fit the nervous, indecisive, hesitant nature of the comic trio at the heart of the show. There are tons more examples, but that's as far as I need to take that tangent. But when the animation suits the characters and the story, then so much more artful is it. (And that's one legitimate criticism of computer animation: it's often so precise, and motions are so discrete and perfectly defined, that much warmth and comic value is irretrievably lost...but I'm still digressing.)
And I'll add a bit more praise for the animation: some of the sequences are captivating and just plain hilarious, especially along with the music. The face-on shot of Fox and Hedgehog setting out on their first burglary of the Master Plan is as perfect as animation can get. And the side-on shot of all the animals digging as they escape the steam shovels and then tunnel to food are just as good--unreal, but just cartoonishly real enough to be funny. (I mean, does the dirt just disappear when they set paw to it? No...though you might think that in this film. But that little suspension-of-disbelief works.)
Next up for Mr. Fox, the voicing. I'm not really a big Clooney fan: no lingering jealousy issues here, no sour-grapes-I'm-salt-n-pepper-too fear of my own mortality, no snarky he-can't-act nonsense. I just haven't been a huge fan of his stuff. I avoided ER with as wide a berth as possible--55 minutes of doctors screwing in closets, and 3 minutes of preposterous untrue medicine crammed in at the end--and he's seemed sort of like a male Sandra Bullock. (Even Brother Where Art Thou struck me as pretty flaky.) If Brad Pitt has been a tabloid hound for over a decade, at least he has real charisma and range--though I think he's better at comedy than drama. But Clooney's voice for this film is dripping gold. It's marvelous. He strikes a perfect blend of conversational tone and high tension for pretty much the entire film. Clooney's voice and the animation are reasons enough to watch.
Dahl's underlying story is excellent too--of course, you know very well by now that I think that.
But what those producers did to the story makes my stomach turn--and the more I think about it, the more my stomach turns. Somehow they drained the original story of its entire intent, of all its warmth and joy. Sure, ostensibly it's still there, with the animals celebrating a seemingly inexhaustible food supply along with their unassailable underground position, at the end of the story: but the food supply is a megastore-type supermarket, and their home is the sewer.
I understand stories need to be updated. Fantastic Mr. Fox was published in 1970 (the year I was born, yeah!), so in order to bring this one into the world of 21st-century kids, things like cell phones and TV and omnipresent media can be brought in. I don't object to that. And short children's books, in order to be made into feature-length movies, need major plot additions, just to make then long and complex enough to be worth an hour or more. I understand that too. But so many of the movie's warmest, most intimate moments come when things are folksiest, that when things veer completely away from that, the movie loses much of its dramatic muscle, and bleeds away. At the beginning, scenes are introduced with silent chapter-head style lettering, such as "GRAND PLAN PART A", and, of course, later on, "THE SHOOTING". Since most adults will, like me, know the book almost by heart, these are quaint and reassuring devices. But after the dynamite blast (the first major departure from the book), no more. The second half of the movie is decidedly gray, dreary, and industrial in look and tone.
Where such a significant portion of the plot--really, the character crisis for Mr. Fox--centers on the animals' characters as wild animals, following their instincts like we humans follow ours, then what to make of the end? The animals aren't living in holes of their own digging, in the woods. The animals are in an urban setting, shopping at a supermarket. And that's an improvement over the beginning of the movie, how exactly? By following their wild instincts, the animals become sewer pests? We're supposed to admire Mr. Fox for bringing this about?
As for their big escape plan...so the badgers are demolition experts. Okay...I guess I can accept that. Seems they have enough TNT to blow up most of a city block. Why not...use it to blow out one of the sewer walls and just get away some other route? Why go public in such a destructive manner, setting an entire city block aflame? (And this is too big a circumstance, unlike the unreal digging, to let go of. Dahl was a writer, a really good writer, and good writers know that a plot has to withstand some pretty severe logical questioning, so that said plot doesn't have holes as big as a sewer main running through it. I'm pretty sure he wouldn't've signed off on the idiotically violent urban-escape plot. Wild forest animals. Tend to do things on the sly. Massed frontal assault isn't really their style, as Foxy himself attests. So why base the plot on it?
Then the farmers. They're appropriately mean and comical, much of the time--until the movie reaches the end of the book. See, the book's plot is followed more or less faithfully, but there's an extra wrinkle: after the foxes and badgers and moles dig their beautiful holes and raid the farmers' warehouses from below...the animals take absolutely everything. Not enough to survive, not enough to be comfortable...they utterly clean the farmers out. So of course, there must be a reprisal, as becomes quickly evident, because the movie's tone becomes even darker, more vicious, and more baleful.
Bean, the cider maker who's the cleverest of the three, throws an ugly tantrum and trashes their trailer headquarters--nothing remotely funny about the scene. Just moments before that, in one of the most gratuitously cruel and inane moments of the film, Bean has cursed out one of his employees. They're on stakeout duty, trying to starve out the foxes, and it has just become clear that the foxes outsmarted them. Pete, the worker, is playing a banjo along with a pick-up band of other employees around a fire, and they're rattling out some fine backwoods-style folksy music, with Pete himself jibber-jabbering nonsense lyrics, like "Bee-bop-a-dohh-a-mee-lee-loo..." Bean stalks over, asks what he's singing, and when Pete answers, "Nothing...I'm just making it up as I go along, I guess," Bean hits him hard and yells, "Thats a bad song! You wrote a bad song, Pete!" and marches off. And Pete just sits there stunned, doesn't resume playing, but the whole scene is still for several seconds before we move to some other action.
Now...what is the point of that? We already knew Bean is mean. That music was one of the most fun parts of the film, echoes of the folksy stuff at the beginning...it's as if the producers wanted to intentionally kill the folksy aspect of the story, and signal in a very graphic way that the plot was assuming a new, crueler, emptier character.
Mrs. Fox gets in on the action. The farmers' response to the animals' underground city is to flood it with cider--a plot development not unworthy of Dahl. The animals are washed into the sewer, and then trapped there when Bean covers up every manhole with a vehicle. The animals, first trapped, then saved, now trapped even more miserably, turn on Mr. Fox a second time. And so does his wife.
They have another quiet conversation in a side chamber, away from the others, where Fox does a bit of psychoanalysis on himself (another 21st-century update: characters dejectedly deconstructing themselves and others) and admits that he's craved adulation--wanted to be known as Fantastic--his whole life. And it seems that's enough for reconciliation. He and Mrs. Fox approach each other. "I love you," he says.
"I love you too," she says, "but I shouldn't've married you."
What?
I mean, seriously...what? What on earth was that about?
That moment passes even Bean's tirade at the musician and subsequent savaging of his office, for sheer viciousness. It's hard to imagine anything crueler she could possibly have told her husband. It's almost unforgivably cruel.
Why this cruelty and meanness? It becomes the overriding theme of the film. Forget supposed wild instincts and individual skills each of the species possesses. This film is about individuals hurting one another. The animals aren't out to survive. They decide to insult and humiliate their opponents. That's a more human than animal instinct, and it's the opposite of Dahl's story.
The destruction of Dahl's book, the replacement of a kind and loving spirit with its opposite, was intnentional. There are too many horrible things in this film to overlook. Even the apparently innocent use of the word "cuss", which never feels graceful or adequate...it starts out as a "you cussin' me!?" kind of challenge, but quickly becomes a thin-as-paper veil for an F-bomb. I just don't care that kids are growing up much more quickly now than they did decades ago--that kids under 10 are subjected to highly sexualized imagery (ubiquitous in advertising). Do kids in a film really need to hear that things are becoming a "cluster-cuss"? That's not even funny. Fox says it to his wife as they lie in their underground chamber, having escaped the dynamite but before they've cleaned out the farmers.
Oh, and the farmers again. Or, rather, their farms: less like farms and more like concentration camps, with high masonry walls, razor wire, searchlights, moats, patrol vehicles and elaborate security systems. Bean even carries a Glock. You might almost expect to see a gas chamber somewhere.
Again--what does this add to a children's movie? Do the producers think they're talking so effectively over the kids' heads to the adults, that they can sacrifice almost everything childish about the movie except for the animation?
Let's talk about some cruelty again--this time, on Fox's part toward his own child, Ash. One of the new movie wrinkles was that the Foxes have only one pup, and the other pup arrives as a loaner from Fox's brother, who's very sick. So there's Ash, Fox's son, and the other, highly accomplished and athletic youngster, Kristofferson. Fox has already somewhat marginalized Ash within his three-fox family for being runty and uncoordinated--unlike his dashing and splendidly talented self--but the graceful and stylish Kristofferson completes the job quickly.
That wrinkle, by itself, I'm not upset at. But there are some chilling aspects to it. First, even though Kate didn't hear it, and it doesn't show up in the movie's summaries, I could've sworn I heard Fox call his son "Ashley" at least once--and Ashley is a name that can be used more easily for a girl than a boy. If you look carefully at Ash's eyes, they're ringed with black, like thick, Amy Winehouse-type eyeliner, making Ash look even more feminine. And in the final scene--that odious dance in the supermarket--Ash has been drinking punch from a straw, and has what can only be described as pink lipstick. The lips look like a woman's full set, with the double bulge and middle seam on top, and the single bulge on the bottom: they're female lips.
Again, the same question: what is the point of an adult theme like this in a children's movie? Why emphasize Ash's inadequacy issues by making him androgynous, or even feminine? It's not that I fear it: I don't intend to shield Eva from things like that, though it doesn't mean I'll be shoving gay, lesbian and transgendered living in front of her every day. That's not my life, so I don't feel the need. But what she sees for herself, when she asks, I'll give honest answers about what people do, and I won't hide from it. But, this film...what is the objective? Simply to blur gender roles in a way that kids couldn't miss, at least on some level? And since the androgynous signs were things that the little fox had no control over (his native fur coloring) or likely awareness of (every kid stains his face with punch)...the message seems to be that Ash is more feminine than masculine, without his even knowing it. Now that qualifies as subversion.
I'm not trying to play Chicken Little here. After all, it's just a movie, and what comes between breaks in most children's shows can be far worse, in aggregate. So what if all these touches of heartlessness, viciousness and cruelty, not to mention transgendering a young boy, are merely jokes on the part of the producers, something we're meant to see as dark humor? I say this: humor contains empathy. Between the warriors in Kill Bill, there is some acknowledgement of each other's worth. And even when Beatrix kills Bill at the end, the second-to-last shot is of her curled up in her hotel bathroom, laughing and crying by turns, whispering "Thank you...thank you...thank you..."
Whom, do you think, she is thanking? And why?
That is why great films are so great: things come full circle, find a resolution. There is some connection possible to every character. Everyone has some loveable trait or foible. Even in Dahl's book, the farmers are just bumbling enough that you kind of smile at their idiotic vindictiveness. But Bean in the film runs an army by walkie-talkie, struts around like an icy general, and is without a sympathetic quality.
Like the rat. Ohhh, I almost forgot about the rat. He's voiced by Willem Dafoe, one of my favorite actors (along with Benicio Del Toro). In the book, the rat is a mean-spirited but oafish drunk, who tries to stop Fox but has no real chance of doing so.
In the movie...he's kind of terrifying. He's as big as Fox, wiry, black, and Dafoe uses a voice that has perhaps a southern twinge, but to me vaugely suggests something hispanic. The rat moves around with a sidelong, Vinnie-and-the-Jets swagger, sports a switchblade, and is even more evil than Bean. He goes so far as to suggest that Mrs. Fox slept around, and was the forest skank, before meeting Mr. Fox.
Again, more resoundingly than ever...why in a children's film?
Besides, that's a pernicious little element, aside from sexualizing her and putting in an entire subtext that just doesn't belong in the film--the rat is coming on to her later on as she tries to defend her child from him, and she comes off looking like some two-bit dominatrix--Mrs. Fox' supposed former nature.
See, the whole film's premise is how Mr. Fox can't deny his former, real nature, as a wild animal who steals and kills things to live. So, in that light...what to make of the insinuations that Mrs. Fox got around in days past? Is that something she, likewise, can't be expected to control?
So awkward and marginally athletic boys are secretly effeminate, and women are nothing more than their libidos. That's the subtext I pick up from this "joke", if it's really supposed to be that.
And what kind of resolution is there for our heros, for Mr. Fox and his family? After his wife directly, in the meanest way possible, rejects him, she sheepishly raises her hand and says she'll go along with his plan to escape the sewer. That's their reconciliation. And Ash saves the day by dashing through machine-gun fire to release a rabid dog on the farmers and their gangs. Fox admits his son has some talent after all, and rewards him with a bona-fide black bandit's mask. And that's all Ash gets for reconciliation too.
Not so much as a hug, or a kiss, or any real warmth at all.
Wrap it all up with a line dance in a supermarket aisle and you've got Fantastic Mr. Fox, the movie. I'm glad I saw it, but there's not much chance I'll be watching it again. And I think I want to re-read the book to drive the film from my mind.
Like last night...I forced Kate to watch the end of Con Air (we had no idea what was happening), just so I could cleanse my mind, so to speak, like having cheese after a particularly bad wine. At least a ridiculously bad movie, strictly on its own merits, is better than one that perverts, shreds and torches one of my favorite books.
Then the farmers. They're appropriately mean and comical, much of the time--until the movie reaches the end of the book. See, the book's plot is followed more or less faithfully, but there's an extra wrinkle: after the foxes and badgers and moles dig their beautiful holes and raid the farmers' warehouses from below...the animals take absolutely everything. Not enough to survive, not enough to be comfortable...they utterly clean the farmers out. So of course, there must be a reprisal, as becomes quickly evident, because the movie's tone becomes even darker, more vicious, and more baleful.
Bean, the cider maker who's the cleverest of the three, throws an ugly tantrum and trashes their trailer headquarters--nothing remotely funny about the scene. Just moments before that, in one of the most gratuitously cruel and inane moments of the film, Bean has cursed out one of his employees. They're on stakeout duty, trying to starve out the foxes, and it has just become clear that the foxes outsmarted them. Pete, the worker, is playing a banjo along with a pick-up band of other employees around a fire, and they're rattling out some fine backwoods-style folksy music, with Pete himself jibber-jabbering nonsense lyrics, like "Bee-bop-a-dohh-a-mee-lee-loo..." Bean stalks over, asks what he's singing, and when Pete answers, "Nothing...I'm just making it up as I go along, I guess," Bean hits him hard and yells, "Thats a bad song! You wrote a bad song, Pete!" and marches off. And Pete just sits there stunned, doesn't resume playing, but the whole scene is still for several seconds before we move to some other action.
Now...what is the point of that? We already knew Bean is mean. That music was one of the most fun parts of the film, echoes of the folksy stuff at the beginning...it's as if the producers wanted to intentionally kill the folksy aspect of the story, and signal in a very graphic way that the plot was assuming a new, crueler, emptier character.
Mrs. Fox gets in on the action. The farmers' response to the animals' underground city is to flood it with cider--a plot development not unworthy of Dahl. The animals are washed into the sewer, and then trapped there when Bean covers up every manhole with a vehicle. The animals, first trapped, then saved, now trapped even more miserably, turn on Mr. Fox a second time. And so does his wife.
They have another quiet conversation in a side chamber, away from the others, where Fox does a bit of psychoanalysis on himself (another 21st-century update: characters dejectedly deconstructing themselves and others) and admits that he's craved adulation--wanted to be known as Fantastic--his whole life. And it seems that's enough for reconciliation. He and Mrs. Fox approach each other. "I love you," he says.
"I love you too," she says, "but I shouldn't've married you."
What?
I mean, seriously...what? What on earth was that about?
That moment passes even Bean's tirade at the musician and subsequent savaging of his office, for sheer viciousness. It's hard to imagine anything crueler she could possibly have told her husband. It's almost unforgivably cruel.
Why this cruelty and meanness? It becomes the overriding theme of the film. Forget supposed wild instincts and individual skills each of the species possesses. This film is about individuals hurting one another. The animals aren't out to survive. They decide to insult and humiliate their opponents. That's a more human than animal instinct, and it's the opposite of Dahl's story.
The destruction of Dahl's book, the replacement of a kind and loving spirit with its opposite, was intnentional. There are too many horrible things in this film to overlook. Even the apparently innocent use of the word "cuss", which never feels graceful or adequate...it starts out as a "you cussin' me!?" kind of challenge, but quickly becomes a thin-as-paper veil for an F-bomb. I just don't care that kids are growing up much more quickly now than they did decades ago--that kids under 10 are subjected to highly sexualized imagery (ubiquitous in advertising). Do kids in a film really need to hear that things are becoming a "cluster-cuss"? That's not even funny. Fox says it to his wife as they lie in their underground chamber, having escaped the dynamite but before they've cleaned out the farmers.
Oh, and the farmers again. Or, rather, their farms: less like farms and more like concentration camps, with high masonry walls, razor wire, searchlights, moats, patrol vehicles and elaborate security systems. Bean even carries a Glock. You might almost expect to see a gas chamber somewhere.
Again--what does this add to a children's movie? Do the producers think they're talking so effectively over the kids' heads to the adults, that they can sacrifice almost everything childish about the movie except for the animation?
Let's talk about some cruelty again--this time, on Fox's part toward his own child, Ash. One of the new movie wrinkles was that the Foxes have only one pup, and the other pup arrives as a loaner from Fox's brother, who's very sick. So there's Ash, Fox's son, and the other, highly accomplished and athletic youngster, Kristofferson. Fox has already somewhat marginalized Ash within his three-fox family for being runty and uncoordinated--unlike his dashing and splendidly talented self--but the graceful and stylish Kristofferson completes the job quickly.
That wrinkle, by itself, I'm not upset at. But there are some chilling aspects to it. First, even though Kate didn't hear it, and it doesn't show up in the movie's summaries, I could've sworn I heard Fox call his son "Ashley" at least once--and Ashley is a name that can be used more easily for a girl than a boy. If you look carefully at Ash's eyes, they're ringed with black, like thick, Amy Winehouse-type eyeliner, making Ash look even more feminine. And in the final scene--that odious dance in the supermarket--Ash has been drinking punch from a straw, and has what can only be described as pink lipstick. The lips look like a woman's full set, with the double bulge and middle seam on top, and the single bulge on the bottom: they're female lips.
Again, the same question: what is the point of an adult theme like this in a children's movie? Why emphasize Ash's inadequacy issues by making him androgynous, or even feminine? It's not that I fear it: I don't intend to shield Eva from things like that, though it doesn't mean I'll be shoving gay, lesbian and transgendered living in front of her every day. That's not my life, so I don't feel the need. But what she sees for herself, when she asks, I'll give honest answers about what people do, and I won't hide from it. But, this film...what is the objective? Simply to blur gender roles in a way that kids couldn't miss, at least on some level? And since the androgynous signs were things that the little fox had no control over (his native fur coloring) or likely awareness of (every kid stains his face with punch)...the message seems to be that Ash is more feminine than masculine, without his even knowing it. Now that qualifies as subversion.
I'm not trying to play Chicken Little here. After all, it's just a movie, and what comes between breaks in most children's shows can be far worse, in aggregate. So what if all these touches of heartlessness, viciousness and cruelty, not to mention transgendering a young boy, are merely jokes on the part of the producers, something we're meant to see as dark humor? I say this: humor contains empathy. Between the warriors in Kill Bill, there is some acknowledgement of each other's worth. And even when Beatrix kills Bill at the end, the second-to-last shot is of her curled up in her hotel bathroom, laughing and crying by turns, whispering "Thank you...thank you...thank you..."
Whom, do you think, she is thanking? And why?
That is why great films are so great: things come full circle, find a resolution. There is some connection possible to every character. Everyone has some loveable trait or foible. Even in Dahl's book, the farmers are just bumbling enough that you kind of smile at their idiotic vindictiveness. But Bean in the film runs an army by walkie-talkie, struts around like an icy general, and is without a sympathetic quality.
Like the rat. Ohhh, I almost forgot about the rat. He's voiced by Willem Dafoe, one of my favorite actors (along with Benicio Del Toro). In the book, the rat is a mean-spirited but oafish drunk, who tries to stop Fox but has no real chance of doing so.
In the movie...he's kind of terrifying. He's as big as Fox, wiry, black, and Dafoe uses a voice that has perhaps a southern twinge, but to me vaugely suggests something hispanic. The rat moves around with a sidelong, Vinnie-and-the-Jets swagger, sports a switchblade, and is even more evil than Bean. He goes so far as to suggest that Mrs. Fox slept around, and was the forest skank, before meeting Mr. Fox.
Again, more resoundingly than ever...why in a children's film?
Besides, that's a pernicious little element, aside from sexualizing her and putting in an entire subtext that just doesn't belong in the film--the rat is coming on to her later on as she tries to defend her child from him, and she comes off looking like some two-bit dominatrix--Mrs. Fox' supposed former nature.
See, the whole film's premise is how Mr. Fox can't deny his former, real nature, as a wild animal who steals and kills things to live. So, in that light...what to make of the insinuations that Mrs. Fox got around in days past? Is that something she, likewise, can't be expected to control?
So awkward and marginally athletic boys are secretly effeminate, and women are nothing more than their libidos. That's the subtext I pick up from this "joke", if it's really supposed to be that.
And what kind of resolution is there for our heros, for Mr. Fox and his family? After his wife directly, in the meanest way possible, rejects him, she sheepishly raises her hand and says she'll go along with his plan to escape the sewer. That's their reconciliation. And Ash saves the day by dashing through machine-gun fire to release a rabid dog on the farmers and their gangs. Fox admits his son has some talent after all, and rewards him with a bona-fide black bandit's mask. And that's all Ash gets for reconciliation too.
Not so much as a hug, or a kiss, or any real warmth at all.
Wrap it all up with a line dance in a supermarket aisle and you've got Fantastic Mr. Fox, the movie. I'm glad I saw it, but there's not much chance I'll be watching it again. And I think I want to re-read the book to drive the film from my mind.
Like last night...I forced Kate to watch the end of Con Air (we had no idea what was happening), just so I could cleanse my mind, so to speak, like having cheese after a particularly bad wine. At least a ridiculously bad movie, strictly on its own merits, is better than one that perverts, shreds and torches one of my favorite books.
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