The fantastical fantastic movie by the fantastic director Wes Anderson, starring the fantastical George Clooney and the fantastic Meryl Streep called the Fantastic Mr. Fox!
The film is a stop motion adaptation of a Roald Dahl novel. Mr. Fox, after having sweared to his wife he'll leave the dangerous business of chicken stealing reverts back to his old ways, endangering his family and entire neighbourhood when he steals from 3 incredibly ugly and psychopathic farmers.
Most people still don't appreciate the amazing technique of stop motion animation, simply cos they don't know what it is. Well you uncultured Malaysian... stop motion is shooting a film frame by frame while physically manipulating set pieces to make them look like their moving on their own. Basically.. it's moving every tiny detail of a set piece one at a time, taking lots and lots of photos and stringing everything together. It's friggin hard so I really salute the makers of Mr. Fox.
Some people complain that the stop animation is too sloppy and the set pieces does seem choppy when played in linear but that's what is so great about stop motion in my opinion. Sure you can go all perfectionist like Henry Selick's Coraline to the point where you don't even notice the stop motion but what's the point to that really? The little riffs and slight inperfections in Mr. Fox's animation is a great throw back to what stop motion used to be back in the 80's.
George Clooney, The Man, The Almighty God of Acting shines once more as the witty, fast talking, charming Mr. Fox. His stop motion character reminded me of a mash between Danny Ocean and Ulysses Everett McGill. Incredibly fun to watch and hard not to like Mr. Fox even if he is a crappy dad and husband.
Michael Gambon was great as Franklin Bean, the leader of the psychotic farmers going after Mr. Fox and family. He gets into so many violent fits of rage, Fantastic Mr. Fox seemed more like an adult movie instead of a kids cartoon most of the time. It was like watching Dumbledore play Lord Voldemort wahaha.
Kudos to the scriptwriters who came up with a fantastic script of so much clever humour and just maximum levels of wit and charm. That's all I can use to describe the movie really, wit and charm. It's kind of sad that most Malaysians won't enjoy Mr. Fox's comedy cause their just too dumb to get intelligent satirical jokes. To them, a man in cicak costume is more entertaining.
It's also a shame that Fantastic came out the same year as Pixar's Up because I really really really want to see this film win some animation awards which by now are already reserved in Up's honor. But for what it's worth, Fantastic Mr. Fox is an animation gem, woth seeing in the cinema and worth buying the DVD.
RATING: 8/10
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