Review: 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' is full of wit and silliness

"Fantastic Mr. Fox" actually is pretty fantastic -- a wiseacre, quick-shooting, whack-a-doo joy ride of a film filled with goofy characters and famous voices.

With its stop-motion-animated, herky-jerky feel and ticky-tacky, glued-on look, director Wes Anderson ("Rushmore," "The Darjeeling Limited") finally has the right medium for his puppet show gifts.

His characters have never felt particularly real anyway; and now, in this adaptation of the children's book by Roald Dahl, they aren't. Suddenly everything clicks.

The central famous voice, of course, belongs to George Clooney, playing the title character. Mr. Fox is something of a playboy thief as the film begins, famous for his skill at stealing chickens and other birds.

His right-hand honey is Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep). But right in the midst of their first caper, just as things are going terribly wrong, she informs him that she's pregnant and he's going to have to change his bird-stealing ways and get a real job.

Flash ahead three years and Mr. Fox hasn't gotten a real job, but he's a newspaper columnist and that will do. Young Ash (Jason Schwartzman) is now an adolescent fox and a bit of an oddball, and the family lives beneath the ground in a comfortable foxhole.

But Mr. Fox wants more from life, which leads him to buy a tree house directly across from three big farms run by three dangerous farmers.

And after he and the family have moved in, along with a visiting teen cousin named Kristofferson (Eric Anderson) given to yoga and martial arts, Mr. Fox begins to feel the allure of chicken stealing once again.

As his assistant, Mr. Fox enlists the unlikely help of Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky), an opossum with a taste for small fish, not chickens. And off the two go to renew Mr. Fox's life of crime.

Things go well for a while -- chickens keep mysteriously showing up in Mrs. Fox's refrigerator -- but when the farmers realize that Mr. Fox is on the prowl, they set out to stop him. And soon all the wildlife in the woods are involved in a struggle for survival ... thanks to the now not-so-fantastic Mr. Fox.

Anderson lays all this out at a madcap pace, and his flair for the suddenly outrageous and patently absurd serves him well. He'll stop suddenly as Kylie's eyes turn into space orbs, speed things up as Mr. Fox dashes across a farmyard or pause for a dance sequence appropriate of nothing.

Yet among all this whackiness the director, who co-wrote the screenplay with Noah Baumbach, is still exploring family dynamics, the pull and push between husband and wife, the dissonance between the over-achieving Kristofferson and the gawky Ash.

All in all it's an interesting entertaining mix, filled with lots of laughs and constant entertaining -- imaginative, risky and sometimes just plain silly. Thankfully bereft of the pop-culture references that plague too many family films these days, "Mr. Fox" instead revels in its stop-motion simplicity and florid sense of whimsy.

The result is a quirky film that should work for all ages, with just a hint of dark humor. In this age of high-tech animation, Wes Anderson has found himself in a low-tech wonderland.

tlong@detnews.com">tlong@detnews.com (313) 222-8879 Read Tom Long's blog at detnews.com/tomlongblog.