A review of The Fantastic Mr. Fox

The Fantastic Mr. Fox is not a simple movie.

It is possible to try to watch the story unfold the way you might watch a Disney/Pixar offering, and it is equally possible that you will find the film enjoyable at the level of a straight forward narrative because the movie--like its star--has an undeniable charm. Yet while you'd leave the cinema smiling, it would be a bemused, slightly confused sort of smile, of the sort you might wear after watching a Japanese game show sans translation: you're not quite sure what just happened, but it was certainly entertaining.

In the stop motion film, a scene takes place about midway through where Coach Skip (gym teacher) is trying to explain to Kristofferson (apparently the fox species version of Michael Jordan, Manny Pacquiao and pre-scandal Tiger Woods all rolled into one) the intricacies of the popular sport in the animal community, called Whackbat (you can play a virtual version of the game here). The explanation comes in the form of a staccato, convoluted set of sentences (accompanied by an increasingly cluttered on-screen chart) which exemplifies the surreal, twisting, detail of the movie:

"Basically, there's three grabbers, three taggers, five twig runners, and a player at Whackbat. Center tagger lights a pine cone and chucks it over the basket and the whack-batter tries to hit the cedar stick off the cross rock. Then the twig runners dash back and forth until the pine cone burns out and the umpire calls hotbox. Finally, you count up however many score-downs it adds up to and divide that by nine."

Kristofferson, in turn, responds simply: "Got it."

And he does--even if the viewers may not understand the intricacies of Whackbat, the characters do, and in a way that allows the viewer to concentrate on the essential, in this case the fact that Whackbat is central to the relationships between Mr. Fox, his son Ash, and Kristofferson. The fact that the characters (from humans to animals) treat the absurd elements of their world as ordinary and hardly worthy of comment gives the viewer the license to focus his/her attention on what the movie is really about: relationships--the relationship between a man and his community, a man and his family, a man and himself.

For a director who has a reputation for having "anti-realist" leanings, director Wes Anderson's portrayal of these relationships is very much grounded in our less-than-perfect reality. Much of this might be attributed to the source material (a classic book by famed children's author Roald Dahl) but the way the film comes together would seem to do the text proud. The main characters have a depth and a certain internal inconsistency that is not often found in films, animated or not. This is best typified by the lead character himself--voiced, appropriately, by George Clooney--a character who is indisputably the hero of the story, but who is decidedly not the ideal father or husband, even by the end. Mr. Fox's actions are what drive the story forward, and his self-serving desires are the root cause of the macro (between the animals and the farmers) and the micro (within his own extended family) level conflicts of the film, but unlike the traditional young adult fare wherein the hero emerges from the conflict having Overcome His/Her Weakness, at the end of the movie we're left unsure as to whether or not Mr. Fox has changed, or if instead he has changed the world to suit his nature. What's more, we're not certain which outcome we'd have preferred.

Yet that lack of concrete closure is itself typical of relationships, where most is left unsaid and much of what is said is not quite what is meant. As Mr. Fox says in response to a seemingly non-sequitur comment from Ash: "What's the subtext here?"; while the film is enjoyable on almost any level, without being willing to ask that question of the movie itself, a viewer will be unlikely to see the Fantastic in the Fantastic Mr. Fox--and that would be a shame.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox was shown exclusively at the Glorietta. With luck, it will be shown again after the Metro Manila Film Festival. If not, do try to catch it when it comes out on DVD.

Further Reading:

Fantastic Mr. Fox Image screen captured from the official website.

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