Fridae

In this degenerate age, with the decline in filmmaking talent, one would do well to beware of the self-styled Auteur. In a more innocent, noble, and creative past, the auteur was never a boring one-trick pony, spitting out films that were basically the same film that made him an Auteur, tediously telling the same story over and over again.

Mr Wes Anderson is an Auteur. Both The Aquatic Life with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited showcased Anderson as an auteur whose reliance on familiar trademarks and setups have started to freeze uncomfortably into mannerisms and tics, painting him into an artistic corner – in other words, the auteur one must beware of.

With Fantastic Mr Fox, Wes Anderson finally shows us what auteurs are for: breaking new ground, showing fresh perspectives, surprising audiences. We suspect it boils down to taking on a completely new medium (that of stop motion animation), and working on material written by someone else (in this case, Roald Dahl).

While Roald Dahl wrote his children’s book as a conservative pastoral piece with a undercurrent of anxiety over creeping industrialisation and the disappearance of the wilderness, Anderson revisions the tale as first and foremost, a comic heist film. The titular Mr Fox, a respectable newspaper columnist who has retired from a life as a poultry robber, attempts to pull off one last big job – targeting the three meanest and wealthiest farmers in the land. Even with this tried and tested genre, Anderson manages to confound narrative expectations, with his sly borrowing of the Star Wars trilogy plotting and the breeziness and insouciance of Soderbergh’s Ocean’s movies.

And yet, the best thing about Fantastic Mr Fox happens to be how Anderson manages to translate, adapt, and rework his cinematic style, aesthetics, themes, and offbeat humour into a totally unfamiliar medium. The results are highly entertaining, creative, and original. And uniquely Wes Anderson.

Fantastic Mr Fox may well be the best-written and most engaging animated movie of 2009. Yes, Mr Wes Anderson is an auteur, and he should be proud of it.