Fantastic Mr. Fox
4 stars PG 
Review
Trust the director of The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore to turn a straightforward children’s story about a fox on the run into a wacky examination of family dysfunction, existentialism and adolescent angst.
And with Clooney’s Mr Fox and his all-American animal chums being hounded out of the British countryside, there’s some sort of sly anti-colonialist message in there too.
But, all allegorical guff aside, Wes Anderson has come up with the liveliest adventure set on English soil since Wallace and Gromit ran into the were-rabbit.
Fourteen fox years (or two of ours) after promising to stop stealing chickens, our vulpine hero has settled down with his wife (Streep) and son Ash (Schwartzmann), an underachieving sulker whose mood doesn’t improve when super-cool cousin Kristofferson come to stay.
Against the advice of his solicitor (badger Bill Murray), Mr F. buys a detached oak overlooking the fowl farms of foul farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean (one fat, one short, one lean). Unable to contain himself, he promptly raids all three.
Naturally and, let's face it, understandably, cider-swigging Bean (Gambon) and his neighbours hit Foxy with everything they’ve got. They want his guts for garters.
But after trying to dig, blast and flood him out of his ever-deepening foxhole, all Bean gets is his brush for a tie. Unfortunately, the woodlanders are forced into the open when Kristofferson is captured. So, who's got a cunning rescue plan?
In a digitally obsessed world, Mr. Fox delivers some 62,000 frames of jerky, jolly, stop-motion fun. It’s like taking a trip back to the 70s; a nostalgic mash-up between Disney’s Robin Hood and those road safety ads starring Tufty the squirrel.
The script by Anderson and Noah Baumbach (creator of The Squid And The Whale) is so clever you could pin a tail on it – not least in the use of the family-friendly expletive ‘cuss’, as in “This is gonna be a total cluster-cuss for everybody.”
It's bound to raise a few hackles, however, as anyone expecting a faithful adaptation will be disappointed that Anderson focuses on the touchy-feely stuff at the expense of Dahl’s brilliantly drawn villains.
The three Bs of the book were so grotesque and vile you could almost smell them. Here, they’re just a bunch of joyless old grumps.
Streep is also underused and there are a couple of needless distractions involving a silent wolf and Jarvis Cocker as a rubbish folk singer.
But with Schwartzmann, Willem Dafoe (as a sneaky rat) and Wally Wolodarsky’s permanently confused opossum backing the fantastic Mr Clooney all the way, this quick brown Fox jumps easily over every lazy dog in its way.
