1. grandpajoe6191

   8

   Interestingly its choice of presenting the visuals using clay is definitely one of what makes "Fantastic Mr. Fox" a good movie. But its the childish, simple script you'll love.… Expand

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2. Louisa

   5

   A review for any people out there who wanted to see an animal movie: this is not it. To give some context for my review: I totally loved Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic. For me (my sister violently disagrees) the Darjeeling Limited and its prequel, for all their magical sets and wonderful details, was just recycling the previous movies, and I found the Fantastic Mr. Fox, for all its amazing, unique animation, even more recycled. For a movie all about delightful detail, why do we have an opossum in Britain? a pair of foxes with only one cub? beagles without a trace of beagleishness? a rat the size of a fox? The reason is that this is not a movie about animals, it is a movie about people, and in fact this is a movie about people we've already seen in previous Wes Anderson movies. Several times I had an eerie (and not necessarily negative) feeling of deja vu, feeling that Anderson had literally recreated scenes from his live-action movies in puppet form. Roald Dahl is nowhere to be found ("The Fantastic Mr. Fox," which I only read out of curiosity after finding the movie so un-Dahl-ish, was for me not anywhere near the top 10 best Dahl stories, but I was interested to see it was almost completely different in its sense of humor and its priorities--it was really about a fox, for one thing, not a human in a fox's clothing). Anderson's characters' lack of animalness stands in sharp contrast to Pixar's recent terrific movie "Up," where the bird and dogs are wonderfully real and beast-like--even though clearly imaginary.… Expand

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3. tearsoftime

   2

   Fantastic Mr. Fox is a stop motion animated film about woodland creatures doing things. I don’t really understand what those things are because there’s not much plot to be found in the film, but hey, it looked cool, right? Let’s start with the visuals. The whole film looks more like it was sewn together than created with stop motion animation models because there is extreme emphasis on each animal’s fur texture as well as the textures of the surrounding sets. A lot of detail went into the designs of these small-scale figures, but a pleasing visual style alone does not a movie make. In terms of “plotâ€� (if you can even call it that), Mr. Fox is a fox who used to be a criminal and now he’s a newspaper writer. He’s got a wife and kid and a newphew who live with him in a tree and then he’s got some non-fox related animal friends, all voiced by celebrity actors. At some point, Mr. Fox decides that he needs to steal some more stuff for no reason other than he felt like it and that pisses off the farmers from whom he steals. The rest of the movie is a series of scenes depicting the farmers attempts to kill Mr. Fox and Mr. Fox’s efforts to avoid death, mostly by digging underground (although later ridiculous scenes involve pine cone grenades for some reason). The film is certainly a Wes Anderson movie, complete with title cards explaining when a new plot element is happening because the dialogue isn’t doing a good job of that. Often times the characters are focusing on a bunch of petty **** to the point where I felt like I was watching a series of unrelated short films about the daily lives of foxes, which had no over arching plot instead of a cohesive movie. I think it was supposed to be a comedy, but I couldn’t really tell because the “jokesâ€� weren’t funny. At one point we’re shown a scene in which Owen Wilson describes a complicated and made up animal sport to Mr. Fox’s newphew who has never played this sport. Mr. Fox’s nephew accomplishes the task like a professional athlete in this sport, and that’s the scene. There’s no purpose to it being there, Owen Wilson’s character doesn’t show up any time time in the film, and it just eats up about 3 minutes of my life (though it felt like fifteen minutes). I feel like it was just added in to attach Owen Wilson’s name to the bill. Defenders of the film will argue that it helps to illustrate that Mr. Fox’s nephew is more adept at physical activities than Mr. Fox’s son, but prior to this moment in the film, we had already witnessed several other scenes that demonstrate this. Redundancy is not funny. Also, why not just make the central character Mr. Fox’s nephew instead of Mr. Fox if so much screen time is going to be spent on him? For a movie that got so much critical praise when it was released, I honestly expected better. It seems like Wes Anderson can literally **** out garbage on screen and people will eat it up because it’s so quirky and the dialogue is snappy despite serving no function. I feel like the art style of this movie was the only selling point and it caused more people to say they liked it than really would have had this been a Pixar or Dreamworks style CGI film. One last thing: Hollywood, can we please get over this obsession with putting celebrity voice actors into animated movies? No one cares that George Clooney was Mr. Fox; literally anyone could have played him. What makes animated features great is the stories that they can tell which could not be told otherwise through traditional film making means. What we have here is a fairly boring story of a fox digging underground to avoid being killed. The cast is full of celebrities who just phoned it in because they wanted a quick paycheck without the hassle of sitting in a makeup trailer for a few hours before delivering their lines in front of a camera. Let’s not be lazy now, Hollywood. If you want my money, you’re going to have to work for it and deliver to me a quality product. For more reviews like this, check out http://www.TearsOfTime.com… Expand

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