In the book “Fantastic Mr. Fox” by Roald Dahl, published in 1970, the story is oh so simple.
A fox and his family live by stealing from three mean farmers. The farmers get wise to the fox and begin to hunt him. The hunt disrupts all the animals in the area and Mr. Fox must figure out a way to save them. The end.
It’s a beautiful little book with hardly enough material for a 100 pages of text let alone a feature length movie. So to adapt it to for the screen, director Wes Anderson had to take everything from the original and turn it up a notch. He took the original story and gave it some meat – the animals have jobs and back stories. The character personalities are made almost entirely modern – the animals carry cell phones, pay mortgages, spew sarcasm . And adult themes and jokes are peppered throughout the story – look for the word “cuss.” Basically, Anderson took a “fantastic” short story about animals and made human. The result is a movie that works for audiences young and old. Read our review HERE.
“It was always a children’s movie. Other than thinking of that at the beginning, though, I don’t really think we ever particularly thought of it in that way as we went along,” Anderson said. “We just tried to do whatever we liked. Whatever would make the best movie in general. It wasn’t directed exactly at children, we were just trying to make it seem like Roald Dahl. We were trying to imagine how he might have done it. So it’s our version of that.”
This version adds not only complicates the character of Mr. Fox but takes his rivalry with the evil Boggis, Bunce and Bean past the final pages. (Basically the book is the second act of the movie). It also blends Mr. Fox’s four children from the book into one cinematic son, Ash, and cousin, Kristofferson.
“We felt like, for a movie, it was better, rather than having this whole group, to just focus on one personality and to develop a story for him,” Anderson said.
Ash is voiced by Jason Schwartzman, currently on the show “Bored to Death,” who has worked with Anderson on several previous projects. He pointed out that, while the book and film is all about animals, he never felt like he was playing an animal; mostly because Anderson recorded the voices with all the actors together before it was ever animated. To him, that human contact helped him delve into a complex father/son relationship that truly is the heart of the movie.
“I never had time to imagine being a little fox,” Schwartzman said. “I just thought I’m playing a 12 year old misfit who is grumpy, wishes he was a better athlete and that his father loved him more. I think had I done it in a booth alone I would have been pretending to be a fox. But working with real actors, it never once occurred to me that we would be becoming animals.”
In the end, the audience has to believe these animals were real people or the film could not possibly work. Schwartzman totally credits that to his director’s vision and the story teller’s talent.
“They say the perfect kind of marriage is when two people can each have separate lives, but also bring them back to have one life together and I feel that when I see the movie,” he said. “I see Wes very clearly, I see Roald Dahl very clearly and I see the both of them together as partners.”
And that’s what “Fantastic Mr. Fox” feels like, a perfect marriage of new and old that gives humanity to a whole bunch of animals.
The film opens in New York and Los Angeles today and continues to expand through Thanksgiving. For tickets and show times, check out the official site.
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