Fantastic Mr. Fox (film)

Joe Roth and Revolution Studios bought the film rights to Fantastic Mr Fox in 2004. In 2006, Mark Mothersbaugh stated that he was working on the soundtrack.[6] Wes Anderson signed on as director with Henry Selick, who worked with Anderson on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, as animation director. Anderson stated that he signed on because Roald Dahl was one of his heroes.[7] Originally, Cate Blanchett was to voice Mrs. Fox, but she left the role for undisclosed reasons.[8]

The story the novel covers would amount to the second act of the film. Anderson added new scenes to serve for the film's beginning and end.[9] The new scenes precede Mr. Fox's plan to steal from the three farmers and follow the farmers' bulldozing of the hill, beginning with the flooding of the tunnel. Selick left the project, to work on the Neil Gaiman story Coraline in February 2006.[10] He was replaced by Mark Gustafson.[11] 20th Century Fox Animation became the project's home in October 2006 after Revolution left for other projects.[2][12][13]

In September 2007, Anderson announced voice work would begin.[14] The director chose to record the voices outside rather than in a studio: "we went out in a forest, ... went in an attic, [and] went in a stable. We went underground for some things. There was a great spontaneity in the recordings because of that."[11] The voices were recorded before any animation was done.[15]

Anderson said of the production design, "we want to use real trees and real sand, but it's all miniature."[14] Great Missenden, where Roald Dahl lived, has a major influence on the film's look.[7] The film mixes several forms of animation but consists primarily of stop motion.[16] Animation took place in London,[11] on Stage C at 3 Mills Studios and the puppets are created by Mackinnon & Saunders,[17] with Anderson directing the crew, many of whom animated Tim Burton's Corpse Bride.[18] Selick, who kept in contact with Anderson, said the director would act out scenes while in Paris and send them to the animators via iPhone.[19]

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released the DVD and Blu-ray on March 23, 2010.[23] The Criterion Collection released the film on Blu-ray and DVD on February 18, 2014.[24]

On streaming, Fantastic Mr. Fox was added on Disney+ in the US and Canada on May 22, 2020.[25]

Fantastic Mr. Fox grossed $21,002,919 in the U.S., and $25,468,104 outside the U.S., making a total of $46,471,023 worldwide.[5]

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 93% based on 245 reviews and an average rating of 7.90/10. The site's consensus states: "Fantastic Mr. Fox is a delightfully funny feast for the eyes with multi-generational appeal – and it shows Wes Anderson has a knack for animation."[26] The film also became the second highest-rated animated film in 2009 on the site, behind Up. On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 83 out of 100 based on 34 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[27] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[28]

Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars out of four, writing that, like Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, children may find some aspects of the film perplexing or scary, which he considered a positive element to a children's film.[29] A. O. Scott called Fantastic Mr. Fox "in some ways (Wes Anderson's) most fully realized and satisfying film. Once you adjust to its stop-and-start rhythms and its scruffy looks, you can appreciate its wit, its beauty and the sly gravity of its emotional undercurrents. The work done by the animation director, Mark Gustafson, by the director of photography, Tristan Oliver, and by the production designer, Nelson Lowry, shows amazing ingenuity and skill, and the music (by Alexandre Desplat, with the usual shuffle of well-chosen pop tunes, famous and obscure) is both eccentric and just right."[30] Devin D. O'Leary of Weekly Alibi called it "a one-of-a-kind family classic".[31]

According to Time, the film is "both a delightful amusement and a distillation of the filmmaker's essential playfulness"[32] and was one of the ten best films of the year.[33] Cosmo Landesman of The Sunday Times said "having a quirky auteur like Anderson make a children's film is a bit like David Byrne, of Talking Heads, recording an album of nursery rhymes produced by Brian Eno"; according to Landesman, "in style and sensibility, this is really a Wes Anderson film, with little Dahl. It's missing the darker elements that characterise Dahl's books. There you find the whiff of something nasty: child abuse, violence, misogyny. Gone, too, is any sense of danger. Even the farmers, who are made to look a touch evil, don't seem capable of it. We never feel the tension of watching the Fox family facing real peril. The film certainly has Americanized Dahl's story, and I don't mean the fact that the good animals have American accents and the baddies have British ones. It offers yet another celebration of difference and a lesson on the importance of being yourself. But it does leave you thinking: isn't it time that children's films put children first?"[34]

Amy Biancolli from the Houston Chronicle stated that "Anderson injects such charm and wit, such personality and nostalgia — evident in the old-school animation, storybook settings and pitch-perfect use of Burl Ives — that it's easy to forgive his self-conscious touches."[35]

Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post calls it a "self-consciously quirky movie that manages to be twee and ultra-hip at the same time, it qualifies as yet another wry, carefully composed bibelot in the cabinet of curios that defines the Anderson oeuvre."[36] Peter Howell from the Toronto Star stated that "[i]n an age when everything seems digital, computer-driven and as fake as instant coffee, more and more artists (Spike Jonze and John Lasseter among them) are embracing the old ways of vinyl records, hand-drawn cartoons and painstaking stop-motion character movements."[37] In 2011, Richard Corliss of Time magazine named it one of "The 25 All-Time Best Animated Films".[38]

The film was nominated for the 2010 Critics Choice Awards for Best Animated Feature,[39] the 2010 Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film,[40] the 2010 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and Academy Award for Best Original Score;[41] but ultimately lost all the nominations to Up.

It was also nominated for the Grand Prix of the Belgian Syndicate of Cinema Critics. Alexandre Desplat won Soundtrack Composer of the Year and World Soundtrack of the Year at the 2010 World Soundtrack Awards.[42] On January 14, 2010, the National Board of Review awarded Anderson a Special Filmmaking Achievement award.[43]

After giving his acceptance speech, the audio of the speech was used in a short animation of Anderson's character (Weasel) giving the speech, animated by Payton Curtis, a key stop-motion animator on the film.[44]