•
Rating: Wonderful Mr. Fox! Before the child-like love of Moonrise Kingdom, before the aesthetic mania of the comings and goings of Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson had created a small cinematic miracle. A stop-motion animated film, based on Roald Dahl's novel and co-written with Noah Baumbach, someone who later wrote exceptional works like Frances Ha and While We're Young.
This film isn't easy in its premises, but it might be one of the best from the great American filmmaker. The decisive element is the miraculously harmonious blend between the components and classic style elements of an animated film for a children's audience and the language, a setting thought especially for adults. The fusion of the two souls is brilliantly calibrated: while the dynamics of the action are very simple, elementary (after all, much of the film is a fox hunt), the content of the dialogues is instead that of an adult film, in the sense that there's not a lot of simplification of the topics and they address even challenging themes (but always in a light manner). This game is happily highlighted by the screenwriters, who wisely alternate moments of fun and uproar with serious exchanges on topics that normally do not appear in an animated film.
An auteur work, masterfully polished in every word (always on the line between serious and covertly ironic), but which willingly bends to more straightforward, immediate, entertainment logics. The result is a multi-level film that can be enjoyed differently by children and adults, the casual viewer and the critic. Often reckless and adventurous actions can be read both as they are and as a disorienting parody of that cliché. There's fun both for the events themselves and because Anderson proposes his own fine reading of derision. The moments of greatest prominence are in the exaggerations: when the human enemies destroy the hill, or when Fox's son performs that astonishing action at the finale. There is a whole distorting interpretation of the style elements of action sequences, particularly those less realistic in animated films. Or excessive stylization is emphasized, for example, in some shots that highlight heightened geometries.
Compared, for example, to Grand Budapest, the aesthetics seem less end-in-itself. That is, the geometries are there, the chromatics too, but often serve a function of dialogue with other cinema, while in the 2014 film, they appeared more as a self-referential play of aesthetic obsession. Even the choice of stop motion gives the film a different beauty, less glossy and cloying: there is wonder, but there are also various aspects that are overall not very polished and refined. In short, the animals' fur isn't truly realistic, the eyes do not shine and are not too expressive. A part of beauty has been willingly sacrificed to gain originality. Perhaps the message intended is that it is all fiction, as words from an adult film create a short circuit with cartoon dynamics, so the technical imperfections dialogue with the elements of aesthetic value and say that in the end, it's all an artifice, a puppetry construction with its flaws.
At the same time, the characters are memorable, problematic, and more vital than ever, also thanks to the voices of great actors (or their Italian dubbers) who dub them. Thus, another dialogue is created; the one between the puppet theater appearance and the well-built psychology of the protagonists. In this sense, we are at very high levels. The characters have been written with rare mastery by Anderson and the brilliant Baumbach. There is truly everything, and even the minor characters have their unique traits that make them memorable. Despite the intentionally simple structure of the plot, the work is finely detailed: in the dynamics of the action as well as in the characters' traits, in their dialogues as well as in the details of objects and environments. The chapter-based structure itself and the exquisite music work in the same direction.
Loading comments slowly
