Thoughts from the committee
The final day of our weekend-long celebration will kick off with Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, representing the 2000s. This screening will be open to children, with specific details to come.
The impeccable stop-motion caper uses Roald Dahl’s classic novel as a jumping off point for a ‘fun for the whole family’ banger that just happens to dabble in Anderson’s pet themes. Sure, there’s a complicated parent-child relationship at its centre, but it’s also a movie where adorable animal puppets undertake a heist to liberate and redistribute the ill-gotten gains of a trio of farmers. Leading the crew is Mr. Fox, a role that allows George Clooney to basically reprise his title role from the Oceans trilogy—the only difference being that his team of experts are all woodland creatures voiced by Anderson regulars.
Fantastic Mr. Fox fits nicely into a slate of films about ‘playing the part’. Dahl’s work has often benefitted from adaptation by an artist who is able to temper his mean-spiritedness (see also Matilda and both film adaptations of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). For Anderson, this means taking a book that tends towards essentialism and fill it with characters trying to overcome their ‘wild animal’ natures to do something fantastic.
“Children, especially, will find things they don’t understand, and things that scare them. Excellent. A good story for children should suggest a hidden dimension, and that dimension of course is the lifetime still ahead of them.” – Roger Ebert