There's something defiant in the charms of Fantastic Mr. Fox, a nose-thumbing mischief that underlies and yet is of a piece with the film's conspiratorial cheer; director Wes Anderson's terminal self-reflexivity here pushes right past the crisis point, accessing a kind of unlikely afterworld of self-self-reflexivity that elevates a pleasant lark into a wry work of art. When, after The Life Aquatic, critics began leveling charges of an increasingly rigid, constrained aesthetic, one that bound his characters up as marzipan players on a self-consciously confected stage, Anderson responded by building a sort of consecrated altar to everything they said was dragging him down, and in the process rediscovered what made his films so fresh and affecting in the first place.
One of the many films he references in Fox -- notably in a moment of triumph -- is the scene featuring the bisected diorama of a giant ship in his own The Life Aquatic, where each character is shown to be ensconced in their deceptively private, self-contained sphere. When Anderson insisted that the diorama be built to scale and the scene shot without CGI enhancement, he seemed to be insisting on something crucial to not just his aesthetic but his personal philosophy: isn't it better this way? Without the tricks?
Strange signals from a hyper-externalist and lover of visual jargon, and yet the tension between showmanship and subtlety is at the heart of Anderson's appeal to a certain cohort of jaded, closet nostalgics who, having come of age after television but before the internet, aren't even sure what they're longing for anymore. Who knew it would also result in one of the smartest, most enchanting kids' films in memory? When he agreed to adapt Roald Dahl's children's classic for the screen, he insisted on not only on stop-motion animation, but a deliberately retro approach to the form that has more in common with King Kong swatting at helicopters atop the Empire State building in 1930 than Tim Burton's cool, plasticine creations.
Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is a natty fellow in the grass whose shrunken corduroy suit is surely a model of Anderson's own; our first glimpse of him doing his morning calisthenics in the opening scene sets the tone of absurdly pleasing visuals and unalloyed good fun that prevails throughout. In long-shot the look is picture book perfect (if picture book flat), ever conscious of framing and silhouette; in the frequent close-ups (some of them startlingly intimate, to-camera exchanges) Mr. Fox and Co. are marvelous both as artisanal specimens and fully inhabited, three-dimensional characters; in fact the first pleasure complements the second and vice versa.
The Fox family is living comfortably at #1 Bramble on Shrub, an address that is one of a multitude of freeze-frame details (later a scoreboard for a game called "Whack Bat" reads "HOME vs. STRAY"; an unidentified rabbit swigs a soda in the far corner of the screen, perhaps the same bunny who later, with typical inexplicability, crosses himself in Latin). Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), a former hellcat now living the life of a respectable matriarch, keeps Mr. Fox, a local columnist, fed and their son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) more or less in line. Mr. Fox, however, is looking for more out of life, and orchestrates a return to form that involves thieving and bandit hats; his mid-life crisis is summed up lightly ("Who am I? What does it mean to be a fox?"), and really, what else is there to say? When Mrs. Fox confronts him about stealing from the local trio of dastardly farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean, his defense is no less a mixture of delight and regret for being obvious: "I do it because I'm a wild animal."
But these wild animals also experience filial inadequacy, as in a narrative thread (added by Anderson and his co-writer Noah Baumbach) that finds Ash disconnected from his high-flying dad, then jealous of his golden child cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson). Both the writing and the voicing of Ash's character are a highlight; Schwartzman once again hits the duo's downbeats with an uncanny, zen precision that lifts Ash out of stock downer-teen territory. "You're supposed to be my lab partner," Ash says to a cute schoolmate who is distracted by Kristofferson's way with a beaker. "I am your lab partner," she replies. "No you're not. You're disloyal." Just as an observation like "How can the train be lost, it's on rails" benefited from Schwartzman's unself-conscious, bemused and yet deeply inquisitive delivery, here he telegraphs Ash's misplaced grief and still gets the laugh.
Anderson gets many opportunities to revel in old-fashioned ingenuity -- a man without a plan, and ideally a really elaborate blueprint, is nothing in Anderson's world -- as Mr. Fox, having plundered too recklessly, is pursued to the ends of his foxhole by the loathsome farmers. Along the way there are winks at the perils of comfort -- having established a decisive victory and some seriously fat times, the wild animals almost immediately begin complaining about things like cell reception -- and nods to the necessarily unkempt line between wild and civil behavior.
Anderson has fun, as always, with a spirited soundtrack that includes The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, Jarvis Cocker, killer drum lines, banjo solos and more. He also opens up a cinematic grab bag that includes references to West Side Story (Willem Dafoe voices a debauched, turncoat rat in several of the film's best scenes), the spaghetti western, and a line lifted directly from Rebel Without a Cause; there's something exhilarating in the randomness of the latter, as though Anderson is operating from sheer delight.
The film ends on twin grace notes of triumph and compromise, with fat but unnaturally strange times ahead. With success, as Anderson knows, comes complication, the worldly intrusion of plenty, commerce -- critics -- that can carry you away from your instincts, or cause you to disappear somewhere inside of them. What was needed, as it turns out, was a little wild animal craziness: I'm happy to report that Mr. Anderson has obliged.