02/28/10 - Fantastic Mr. Fox

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009, 87 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0432283/

Continuing my march of watching Oscar nominated films I turn my attention to Fantastic Mr. Fox. Now, I'd heard pretty much only good things about this film, but I got the impression it wasn't going to be something I enjoyed. Let's see.

The film is a stop motion animated feature so all the actors are really only providing their voices. Anyway, it stars Mr. Fox (George Clooney), Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), their son Ash (Jason Schwartzman), and Ash's cousin who is visiting Kristofferson Silverfox (Eric Chase Anderson). The family is stuck in a crossroads as Mr. Fox tries to quit his stealing ways while also trying to thwart the evil human neighbors. Featuring prominently among the friends of the Foxes are: landlord Kylie (Wallace Wolodarsky) and lawyer Badger (Bill Murray).

I was impressed with the stop motion animation of the film. The film is a somewhat faded and grainy look but it works with the overall feel the movie goes for in my opinion. This isn't Coraline or Up and it's hard to compare it to them because it has such a drastic different direction. It's based off of a children's book by Roald Dahl but I can't say how much it follows this source and how much it doesn't. On the "look" front though, I really liked Fantastic Mr. Fox. I didn't think it looked impressive from the trailer and shots I'd seen but I ended up quickly liking the style it chose.

Another good aspect of the film were the quirks of each character. I liked how they all worked together to get the entire job done. To be honest, I wasn't that big of a fan of Mr. Fox or Mrs. Fox, but I did like Ash and Kristofferson a lot. I think this is because they were less bland and had a little personality to them. Sure Mr. Fox had some "serious" moments but I didn't think these were all that convincing at making me like his character. As for other characters, Kylie was a pretty cool sidekick.

My problem with the film ended up being how it approached telling its stories. I felt like instead of telling one longer story through the use of some longer "acts" or so, I was instead treated to lots of short segments of film bunched together to tell a longer story. For instance, when Mr. Fox is robbing the houses at the beginning everything is done so quick. I felt like it would have been more enjoyable to spend more time on these little adventures and have a shorter conclusion "war" that really just stretched out too long in my opinion. While it might sound like I'm being contradictory, I'm not; what I most disliked about this final confrontation was that it seemed to be split into too many segments - first they dig some and feel safe, then they get flooded, then they initiate their counterattack, etc. This whole "segmentation" feel of the film was what I found the most grating. The underlying story seemed very short to begin with and this worked as a way to stretch it out to little longer of a movie.

Overall, I gave this film a 5/10. I was impressed visually here, and this surprised me. The story itself though was really weak and seemed stretched out to fill the 87 minutes. I'm actually surprised most of the comments I'm reading online are praising it as much as they are.