12 January 2010
The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2008)
A couple of things strike me: I hadn’t updated my blog in half a year, and I have been working on Bartlett The Bear for over a year now. It started as a short story, but seems to have exploded underneath my feet. Bartlett comes to mind, of course, because of the adorable clay puppets in Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was “pretty fantastic,” if you’ll take the word of Mrs. Fox. 
. One has to wonder what kind of an effect it would have on children–is it fast moving enough? The theater I saw this in seemed to be nothing but Wes Anderson’s core-demographic, which makes you wonder if the film wouldn’t have done better had they opened a theater in Williamsburg with an exclusive showing. (I’ve told Eugene several times as of late, but this new hipster thing where they’re wearing glasses-frames without the glass has got to stop). And yet, I wish I’d seen this movie when I was little, if only to have the word “Cluster-Cuss” as part of my vocabulary.
It struck me that this seems to be the best venue for Wes Anderson’s attention to detail, which lately has become a little ingratiating. (Can anyone watch The Royal Tenenbaums and simply not be annoyed? There’s so much little stuff, so little big stuff.) And yet here – perhaps because of the actual scale of the puppets – this constant, goofy presence is completely charming. “Cuss” graffiti? Granted, I’ve never read Roald Dahl’s original story so I’m not sure what fits where, but this certainly felt through-and-through from the brain of Wes Anderson. And it was so fantastic to finally see Jason Schwartzman’s whispery voice fit somewhere so properly. Eugene and I watched a few minutes of Marie Antoinette and he seemed hilariously out of place, and at least he raises his voice a little in Bored to Death. But here, the whispery thing fit the bill in total, with the enigmatic and constantly disappointing (dare I dah?) differénce of adolescence.
It’s a real shame that kid’s movies can’t always be bursting at the seems with this level of creativity. Hayao Miyazaki is another where you just constantly marvel at the kinds of things he’s able to conjure and throw up on the screen. And while I haven’t seen Disney’s latest, The Princess and the Frog, I can’t help but have the nagging feeling that while it’s probably a fantastic piece of drawn art, you can’t just help the notion that you’ve really seen this all before. Yes, Hayao always has those philosophically convenient blob people, but after seeing this Disney video, I even recognized some of these repetitions in the trailer for The Princess. Which okay, it’s not like they’re scamming us, but you can’t help but feel just a little disappointed.
So: see The Fantastic Mr. Fox, if not because you’re a kid, then because you’re an adult. Not doing so would be nothing short of a full-scale clustercuss.
