Quote-unquote "fantastic"

I can see why a number of critics have expressed the sentiment that The Fantastic Mr. Fox is the best movie of 2009. It's certainly one of the best, if not The Best, film Wes Anderson has made, though claiming the latter might make me dead to my husband and devoted Royal Tenenbaums acolyte (at the least, he should be comforted by the fact that the protagonists of both films share more than a passing similarity and quite a few memorable catch-phrases). Something about the claymation medium -- obsessively detail-oriented, childlike but imbued with a higher level of sophistication than 2-D animation, verging on T.S. Eliot levels of slippage between the American and British paradigm -- is insanely perfect for an Anderson production. And the plot, while peppered with all the trademark Andersoniana (master plans, goofy sidekicks, failure, daddy issues), actually manages to simultaneously coalesce and transcend some of the hang-ups that have plagued the characters and action of earlier films and made them feel too formulaic and phoned in. I doubt I was the only one who was disappointed by this in Darjeeling Limited, where the predictably quirky, neurotic characters could only find redemption through cheap orientalist epiphany. Fantastic Mr. Fox, in contrast, returns the focus to Anderson's strongest, most convincing creation: the Royal/Steve Zissou archetype of the lovable bastard.

Anderson has a lot of fine lines to walk when taking on this theme in the context of a PG-rated "kids' movie" (though there were plenty of kids in the theater with me, I'm inclined to disagree on both the rating and the wisdom of bringing small children to see this often very disturbing, very adult film -- will we ever start rating things according to actual content and not number of boobs or f-bomb?). The fact that he manages to do it so effortlessly is nothing short of astounding; it's one part ingenuity bordering on genius (substituting "cuss" for profanity, for instance, creates a cheeky subtext without sacrificing any atmosphere) and one part aforementioned childlike precocity, for which I'm sure some credit must also go to Roald Dahl (which came first, Anderson's obsession with twee, precocious children or Roald Dahl's twee, precocious child protagonists, one may never know). The fact remains that Anderson takes on the allegorical animal story, a genre practically as old as storytelling itself, and keeps it from descending into lax Disneyan morality or dry didacticism.

Because I'm working on allegory for my dissertation, I couldn't help being captivated by the particular tension that the allegorical form presents, a tension Anderson exploits to muddle the familiar black-and-white binary morality of Aesopian animal tales. According to Walter Benjamin, allegory is often misidentified and misunderstood to be a lazier, lesser method of aesthetic creation, the poor cousin of symbolism, which tends to get a lot more hype. Allegory is perceived to be worse because it seems to offer a one-to-one relationship between what's on the page/stage and the thing it represents in the real world. In the case of Fantastic Mr. Fox, the shallow allegorical reading goes something like this: Fox = man, Fox's wiles and tricks = man's savage nature, tempered by the stamp of modern civility. But, in practice, allegory is never quite so simple. Even after getting immersed in the diegetic reality of the film, I found myself questioning the "fox = man" equation and continually replacing it with "man = ?" To me, that's the true power of allegory -- affirming your own prejudices and preconceptions, and then gently shaking you into realizing just how little they really tell you about the world. Is man a "wild animal," or is this our own private escape fantasy? How important is inner nature, anyway, and isn't it at least partially constructed? Because in the end, "fox" is a man-made archetype, a trickster culled from human features, human frailties, and human triumphs. And yet, whether it's artificially implanted or not, Fox's essential nature is unquestionable. It's what makes him unique and, well, fantastic, but also what makes him maybe not the most exemplary human being. This is perhaps the finest fine line that Anderson walks, since it borders on slipping into the trite "everybody's special in their own way!" miasma of the RBBEAW^* generation. Luckily, instead of sugar-coating this rough pill, Anderson lets the message retain a bitter tinge (after all, Fox's antics nearly kill everyone he's ever loved, and the tension between his domestic and public personae is never entirely resolved in spite of the expected happy ending). In short, I think Anderson has finally found a way to distill the essence of his other anti-heroes (the absent father, the charismatic rake, the eloquent charlatan) into a form that both foregrounds and forgives their shortcomings. It's not that the one side or the other, animal or man, wins out in the end, but that both are combined into the contradictory, clashing force of human nature, in all its ambivalent glory.

^*Raised By Boomers, Everyone's A Winner; shamelessly stolen from McSweeney's.