Fantastic Mr. Fox, which opens today, is the first animated film by Anderson, who is known for directing the quirky and distinctive films Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. Critics weren't as fond of his most recent film The Darjeeling Limited because they felt Anderson was so preoccupied with the film's offbeat style that it stifled the actors. It was a risk for him to take on Roald Dahl's classic children's story because in addition to filming it in old-fashioned stop motion rather than CGI, he directed the film from Paris through a video link to London, where it was filmed.

Anderson wrote the screenplay with Noah Baumbach (who also wrote The Squid and the Whale and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou). Mr. Fox (George Clooney) and Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) start out poaching chickens together, but when their son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) is born, she convinces him to take a more legitimate job. Twelve years later, he's writing a newspaper column no one reads, but when the family moves, he can't resist his wild urge to steal from his human neighbors. Three farmers led by Mr. Bean (Michael Gambon) wage war on the animal kingdom and Mr. Fox, along with his lawyer Badger (Bill Murray) and his sidekick Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky), have to outwit them.

Though at times the plot is jumpy, critics uniformly praise the film, saying it "reanimates" Anderson's career. Though it seems odd to imagine George Clooney's very-recognizable voice coming out of a fox, several critics say he gives one of his best performances ever. The exquisite hand-crafted miniatures give the movie a depth that reviewers said many computer animated films (particularly Jim Carrey's A Christmas Carol) fail to capture. Below, the reviews.

The Village Voice

For the reportedly painstaking labor it took to create, the film is a marvel to behold-with wonderful shifts in perspective, an intensely tactile design, and an intentional herky-jerkiness of motion that only enriches the make-believe atmosphere. Clooney (speaking as if everything were a self-conscious aside) and Streep (resplendent as a former wildcat turned Earth mother) do some of the best work of their illustrious careers. Among the movie's many virtues, they render an unusually convincing portrait of a marriage, a reminder that the most unexpected thing about Anderson's film may be-underneath all the carefully affixed, wind-sensitive whiskers and fur-how deeply human it is.

Salon

There should be something incongruous about the sound of George Clooney's cashmere-flannel voice coming from the mouth of a somewhat rangy-looking fox in a country gent's corduroy suit: Why should a matinee idol suffer the indignity of being trapped in a puppet's body? But from the first minute of the Wes Anderson stop-motion-animated feature Fantastic Mr. Fox, Clooney isthat creature, the genuinely fantastic Mr. Fox of the title, a rapscallion charmer who wears many hats: husband, father, newspaperman, chicken thief. It's one thing for an actor to feel comfortable in his own skin; it's another for him to feel completely at home in the body of a fake-fur and metal-armature vulpus vulpus. And yet Clooney's naturalism is of a piece with the joyous, marvelously detailed movie around him, adapted from Roald Dahl's novel with adventurousness and seemingly boundless love .

Entertainment Weekly

I'm not a big fan of Anderson's work. What I now understand, though, is that in essence, he's alwaysbeen making cartoons; he just confused the issue by putting real live actors in them. Before, he twisted reality into a permanent ironic pose. Now, in the infectiously primitive talking-animal world of Fantastic Mr. Fox, he's become an ironic realist.

Slate

The experience of Fantastic Mr. Fox... is like being magically shrunk down to 1:12 scale and set loose for 90 minutes in an exquisite, handcrafted, dizzyingly well-stocked dollhouse. If, like me, you're a lifelong aficionado of miniatures-someone who still presses their nose to toy-store windows filled with cunningly crafted furniture and tiny kitchen supplies-this movie will seduce you on tactile terms alone. The animal characters' real, shiny fur, gently moving in the wind! The infinitely detailed sets and props: acorn-patterned wallpaper, cutlery made from deer hooves, bespoke corduroy jackets with tiny stalks of wheat in place of pocket squares! You don't want to watch this movie, you want to climb inside it and play.

New York Magazine

There's no way the disparate elements of this movie should jell, yet here they sit, side by side, in the bric-a-brac of [Anderson's] brain. Frames in the foxes' den have a depth of field that evokes Velázquez paintings in the Prado. Then a bunch of characters dash down a tunnel to escape the farmers' bulldozers, looking in long shot like a child's plastic toy soldiers. A confrontation with an elongated hepcat security-guard rat (with the stabbing voice of Willem Dafoe) is scored and staged like a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western. Not even Quentin Tarantino would have the audacity to assemble a soundtrack in which the Beach Boys' "Heroes and Villains" is followed by Burl Ives, Mozart, Jarvis Cocker (as a farmhand) singing and picking a banjo, the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man," and-believe it or not-"Ol' Man River."

The Los Angeles Times

[Fanstastic Mr. Fox] reanimates filmmaker Wes Anderson's career... Not since the memorable days of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore has it made sense to apply those words to Anderson. Though the director never lost his hard-core fans, his work had gotten hermetic, even stifling. With Fantastic Mr. Fox he's managed to be himself and still let some air into the room.

The Hollywood Reporter

The screenplay sometimes overdoes the winking asides, and the film doesn't so much flow as jump from one set piece to the next. But with animation director Mark Gustafson, DP Tristan Oliver and production designer Nelson Lowry, Anderson has created a world as stylized and inventive as anything he's done. From the fox-red glow of a morning idyll to the noirish gutter scene where one character meets his end to the icy fluorescent glare of the film's closing scene — happy but not without compromise — Fox is a visual delight.

The New York Times

At times this adaptation of Roald Dahl's slender anti-fable - truer to the spirit than to the letter of the source - does not even look like a movie. In spite of the pedigreed voices... it feels more like an extended episode of what progressive educators call imaginative play. The sets might just as well have been built out of available household stuff, the stiff figurines animated and ventriloquized on a classroom or bedroom floor by precocious children.

Is it is a movie for children? This inevitable question depends on the assumption that children have uniform tastes and expectations. How can that be? And besides, the point of everything Mr. Anderson has ever done is that truth and beauty reside in the odd, the mismatched, the idiosyncratic. He makes that point in ways that are sometimes touching, sometimes annoying, but usually worth arguing about. Not everyone will like Fantastic Mr. Fox; and if everyone did, it would not be nearly as interesting as it is. There are some children - some people - who will embrace it with a special, strange intensity, as if it had been made for them alone.

Official trailer:

(When I began this essay, I realized I had a few things to say about boys' books and girls' books and how much I've had to talk about them AGAINST MY WILL, but I went on for 19 hours and decided to spare everyone who just wanted some turtle in their soup, many thanks. To read the official preface to the piece, click here.)

For a young reader, I found a surprising number of my books on airport and train station carousels. (See below for more on my status as a world traveler of note.) For this reason, I was introduced to the wondrous Roald Dahl not through the delightful Danny, Champion of the World, James and the Giant Peach, or, of course, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but by the truly demented Tales of the Unexpected and Switch Bitch. (Leave it to me to lead with leprosy.)

That's why when I espied Henry Sugar and Six More on the top shelf of the children's section — still can't decide if it belongs there — I spent my hard-earned budget on the hardcover although it cut out a good 5 paperback purchases. A) It was worth it. B) Henry Sugar is an odd duck of a book, and no two ways about it — the kind of hodgepodge collection you might acquire if you simply asked an author to turn whatever currently sat on the desk and one or two old published favorites from years past, then hurriedly asked for an essay "On Writing" to round out the page count. (For all I know, this is exactly what happened.)

It begins with the spooky and brief story of a boy who rescues a turtle from a terrible death, moves on to a delightful tale of a speeder and a pickpocket, shifts to a story of a trove of Roman silver uncovered in an English field, moves to "The Swan," one of the most terrifying stories about bullying ever written, segues into the fantastical title story about an Englishman who learns to see without his eyes, then takes a break for Dahl to talk about how he became a writer (he invented the word "Gremlin" and hung out with FDR!) before presenting the first thing he's ever published-an account being shot down over North Africa during WWII.

But for all that the collection could seem scattershot, it is not-because it is held firmly together by Dahl's enduring theme: The terrible power of the thick-headed bully, and the transcendence of knowledge and kindness in the face of meaningless cruelty.

Common to horror writers is this pitched battle of the good against the innocent, the moment of quivering uncertainty when we don't know yet whether something terrible is going to happen and won't be able to stand it either way. But what's particular to Dahl, and what I'd forgotten, is how much he associates evil with eating. Because, whether it's to chop up a turtle alive during Waterloo for a dinner course of soup, kill and hack apart a swan for play, or simply greedily hoard silver a stash of wondrous silver, evil in Dahl is associated with overfeeding, and if you need to know who the bullies are, look for close-set, glittering eyes; fleshy lips and a wet, open mouth; meaty arms and thighs; nuts stuck in teeth, or simply the overly oiled who seek only to pamper and increase their flesh.

A Freudian might point out-and might manage to actually be right-that Dahl's linking of evil bullies to food might easily be traced back to the days when he could be caned for leaving a burnt spot on a slice of bread. And in each story there is that horrible moment of non-control and terror when the turtle caught; when the swan is actually shot; the siren goes off; the yogi dies; the silver stolen outright.

But Dahl, for all that horror, is an absurd optimist, who always allows the good to prevail. (My personal favorite revenge on the greedy comes from his story "Lamb to the Slaughter", in which – spoiler – a woman kills her husband with a large frozen lamb, then feeds it to the policemen investigating the crime.) Without exception, the persecuted simply swim, fly, drive, or otherwise slip the grasp of the cruel world. Even Henry Sugar, who's only held back by his own greedy proclivities, winds up a globe-hopper creating homes for the fellow homeless orphans.

Each reader will forever keep the image that stays with her of how they've escaped the grasp of the gobblers of life. (Mine is always Peter from "The Swan" not flying away, but moving his head back and forth to gently make enough of a depression in the train tracks to not be killed when it passes over him. But what Henry Sugar reminds us is that although the world is ruled by the senses, there is more shoot or be shot, cane or be caned, eat or be eaten. While the greedy try to eat it all up, the good see right through them.

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Hello pretties! Very brief Plotfinder this week from a friend who IS DESPERATE to know. The only detail she remembers is that a black girl is told to put butter in her hair to calm it, and, lacking butter, uses ghee. Takers? I remember using butter as lotion which makes your hands smell rancid (Flowers, yes?) but am clueless on this one.

Answer in comments below or send to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. Winner gets FREE COPY.

Also have to relate brief story of what happened to me this morning, JUST BECAUSE I LOVE IT. I live in Jersey City and travel out of Newark Penn station 900 times a month to various places, supporting Amtrak as is my way. (I love trains.) The other day I was in Hudson Booksellers and started chatting with the clerk, and, since it was almost exactly the pub date of my book, told her all about it, and also that I would bring her a card and a copy the next week when I returned. So TODAY, I go in, w/card, and it turned out SHE'D ALREADY ORDERED IT AND THERE IT WAS ON THE SHELVES!



Since I discovered Roald Dahl en route (and contributor Jennifer Weiner, for what that's worth) I urge you — if you are in a place of transit and see a bookseller and you feel like it, tell them about this book! They seem like they'll order pretty much anything.

xoox
L

"We felt like outsiders," said Horning, but "[Harriet taught us] we could be ourselves and survive." That message was an important one to young readers, and parenting blog Babble points out that Harriet paved the way for "beloved, fiesty girls" like Ramona Quimby, Eloise, Olivia, and Junie B. Jones. (But don't call them "tomboys." Apparently that term has term has been proclaimed sexist by a professor at Sarah Lawrence). The thing is, Babble writer Hannah Tennant-Moore then claims that "There remain few correspondingly gender-bending role models for boys. While it's become much more acceptable for girls to do traditionally masculine activities like play sports and crack smart aleck jokes, it remains largely taboo for young boys to play house, dress up, or quietly play with dolls."

I have to disagree with her. What about all the Roald Dahl heroes? I don't remember Charlie Bucket as a stereotypically wise-cracking main character. He loved his grandparents, wanted to help his mother, and was almost painfully earnest. What about James and his Giant Peach? Can you think of any other "gender bending" male young adult mainstays?

Unapologetically Harriet, The Misfit Spy [NPR]
Gender Roles In Children's Literature

Earlier: The Long Secret: CSI: Puberty