Fantastic Mr. Fox

If you’ve never given Fantastic Mr. Fox a fair shot, 2009 is as good a year as any to fix that — Wes Anderson’s film has aged into something like a cult favorite. The film’s own tagline — “Dig the life fantastic.” — tells you almost everything about the tone it’s going for.

Strip away the craft and the premise is simple — The Fantastic Mr. Fox, bored with his current life, plans a heist against the three local farmers. The farmers, tired of sharing their chickens with the sly fox, seek revenge against him and his family. The chemistry between George Clooney and Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Eric Chase Anderson is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, and it shows in every shared scene.

It would be easy to watch Fantastic Mr. Fox purely for its surface pleasures, but there’s more going on underneath. Ideas around anthropomorphism, based on novel or book, and caper surface again and again, and they’re handled with more care than you’d expect from a film wearing adventure clothing. You can also feel cider and farm life working in the background, quietly shaping how later scenes land even when they’re not the explicit focus.

Part of what makes Fantastic Mr. Fox work is how comfortably it sits at the intersection of adventure, animation, comedy and family. Rather than picking one lane and staying in it, the film borrows tonal shifts from each label attached to it, which is exactly why it resists easy summary in a single sentence.

Wes Anderson’s handling of tone throughout Fantastic Mr. Fox deserves particular credit — it would be easy for a film juggling this many ideas to feel scattered, but the direction keeps everything pointed in the same direction. It also helps that Jason Schwartzman, Eric Chase Anderson, Wallace Wolodarsky are given real material to work with; none of them feel like they’re just there to round out a call sheet.

Clocking in at 87 minutes, the pacing rarely sags, which is no small feat for a film juggling this many ideas. Behind the scenes, Regency Enterprises, Indian Paintbrush, American Empirical Pictures backed the production, giving Wes Anderson the resources to fully realize the vision. The economics alone are worth mentioning: a $40,000,000 budget turned into $46,471,023 in worldwide grosses.

If you’re the kind of viewer who gravitates toward adventure films with something on their mind, Fantastic Mr. Fox earns a spot on the list. Nearly 17 years on, Fantastic Mr. Fox hasn’t lost much of its charge — if anything, it plays better with a little distance. It’s a detail easy to miss on a first viewing of Fantastic Mr. Fox, but it rewards anyone paying close attention. That kind of craftsmanship is easy to take for granted until you watch a lesser film try the same thing and fail. Little touches like that are why the film keeps finding new defenders long after its initial release. It’s the sort of small decision that separates a good adventure film from a merely competent one. None of it feels accidental — Fantastic Mr. Fox is the product of choices made with real intention, and it plays that way from start to finish. That’s ultimately the difference between a film people watch once and one they keep coming back to, and Fantastic Mr. Fox lands closer to the latter.