The painstaking process known as stop-motion animation has brought all kinds of things to life, from that big ape King Kong to the very British Wallace and Gromit, but in the playful and funny "Fantastic Mr. Fox" it goes those feats one better: It reanimates filmmaker Wes Anderson's career.
With George Clooney and Meryl Streep voicing the Foxes, the ultra-sophisticated Nick and Nora Charles of the vulpine world, this adaptation of the Roald Dahl tale does more than occupy its own particular space between the worlds of childhood and adults. It provides a pleasantly cerebral experience, exhilarating and fizzy, that goes to your head like too much Champagne.
Not since the memorable days of "Bottle Rocket" and "Rushmore" has it made sense to apply those words to Anderson. Though the director never lost his hard-core fans, his work had gotten hermetic, even stifling. With "Fantastic Mr. Fox" he's managed to be himself and still let some air into the room.
On the face of it, stop-motion animation is an unlikely vehicle to make this happen. It's a labor-intensive practice that involves the frame-by-frame manipulation of three-dimensional models, a process that's so much like watching paint dry that two or three seconds of film is considered a good day's work.
Yet this process was tonic for Anderson, allowing him to create his own very specific environment, complete with animal puppets that had real hair and wore spiffy corduroy jackets based on one of his own and an overall autumnal palette that had no use for the color green. He even found places for his usual cohort of actors, including Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson, as voice talent.
Working with co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach on the droll Dahl novel, a childhood favorite of the director's as well as the first book he owned, allowed Anderson to connect with a congenial sensibility and to expand on the plot. He finds space, for instance, for the odd diversion like "whack-bat," a complex game no one can understand, as well as the dysfunctional family dynamics of which he is especially fond.
The basic thrust of the book, however, remains the same, and that is the battle of wits between the larcenous title character and the combined forces of Boggis, Bunce and Bean, who are not a pugnacious law firm but "three of the meanest, nastiest, ugliest farmers" in Mr. Fox's part of the world.
