Edward Caffrey

Wes Anderson movies, always pleasing on the eye and even more so on the ear, have in recent times been more demonstrative of great eccentricity at the expense of a good story-line.

Anderson has become prone to building movies around characters rather than a plot, leading to efforts like A Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, which are visually stunning with immaculate soundtracks and interesting well-developed characters, but unfortunately this is where their brilliance ends.

Anderson, however, seems to have decided that these superficial niceties are enough and that he need not do anything with his highly developed characters, except push them around through random sequences of events with no apparent continuity. The resulting feature is, in consequence, enjoyable but not gripping, pleasant but ultimately not engaging.

Thankfully, with the help of Roald Dahl, Fantastic Mr Fox brings him firmly back to a more structured plot, as seen in his earlier movies where a clear sense of purpose propels the film forward.

Fantastic Mr Fox has all of the aforementioned qualities which we have come to anticipate from a Wes Anderson film: the stop motion animation is beautiful, especially the colours; the soundtrack fits the movie seamlessly; and the characters are, as usual, eccentric, funny and, for the most part, endearing.

Mr Fox (George Clooney) is everything one would expect of an Anderson character: slick, cool, but also complex and full of quirks. Twelve fox years after his wife, Mrs Fox (Meryl Streep), forces him to stop stealing chickens for a living Fox decides he is tired of the quiet life. He moves his family to a tree sited on a hill, right in sight of the three meanest farmers around: Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, and attempts one last heist: a triple header.

As a subplot we get the hilarious rivalry between Fox's son, Ash (Jason Schwarzman), and Mrs Fox's nephew, Kristofferson (Eric Anderson). There are a few familiar Anderson style indulgences (for instance, Jarvis Cocker has a cameo as Petey who bursts into song about Fox) which are entertaining in themselves, but they only serve to slow down the story, giving the middle section a slower pace.

As a result we get twenty five minutes of tedium as we wait for the movie to get going again. Once the momentum picks up once more though, it rip-roars towards a swashbuckling end, rattling along at the kind of pace which suits this movie best. The result is a good all-rounder of a movie, not quite back to Anderson’s finest maybe, but certainly benefiting from having the story-telling power of Roald Dahl behind it.