Fantastic Mr. Fox

As an avid Roald Dahl fan, you can imagine my excitement on hearing there would be a film adaptation of one of my most beloved children's books. Obviously, I was anxious to see how director Wes Anderson would translate the book onto film, and how the voice actors would measure up to how I imagined the characters. And when I finally did get to go see it, for lack of a better word, it was fantastic. It is filmed in stop animation, and you can see the sheer dedication that went into it. For those not familiar with it, stop animation basically means you shoot a frame, stop the camera, move the models, shoot a frame and so on. By no means is it the most modern technique (it was used in the filming of the original King Kong) and is certainly not one of the most popular techniques; off the top of my head I can only think of Tim Burton and the creators of Wallace and Gromit who favour it.

I of course knew that the film would have to be different from the book, which it was, the book afterall was less than a hundred pages long and aimed at small children. The plot became more complex and characters were added and existing characters were given much more depth. This is certainly an achievement for a film about a society of talking animals.

The cast, I felt perfectly captured the essence of the characters. Jason Schwartzmen's Ash Fox (son of Mr. Fox) portrayal of a boy who desperately wants to be like his father and feels inferior to his cousin Kristoferson provided both humour and emotion. I was doubtful about George Clooney for Mr. Fox but his cocky attitude suited the character perfectly. I felt everything was just as Roald Dahl would have wanted it, from Mr. Fox's study based on Dahl's own at Gypsy house, to the recurring 'bandit hat' gag to the three evil farmer's theme song adapted from Dahl's own poem. Anderson had wonderfully adapted the novel whilst adding his own spin on it.