Fantastic Mr. Fox

The movie ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ is a case in point of how screenwriters will often take a classic story, written by one of the great storytellers of all time, and shat all over it in some feeble attempt at ‘revisionism’. In this case, the creators seem to have gone that one step further, and have revised Roald Dahl’s classic in the name of (post)modernising the story for a contemporary audience. Well it didn’t work. The postmodernising of the story which I refer to came in many forms, in fact, the movie was saturated with these ill-conceived notions of social commentary. From the weak existential moments, as Mr. Fox questions his fox-ness, to failed commentaries on consumer culture, and finally to the lame attempts at demonstrating swearing by replacing swear words with the word ‘Cuss’ – obviously some obnoxious comment on the amount of verbal violence in the media today – the whole film came off as nothing more than a try-hard pastiche, stripping the story of its original innocence.

In fact, it was insulting and uncomfortable to watch as one of my favourite childhood characters went from sly, clever but altogether loveable fox, to obnoxious, self-centred, and overly-ambitious for no other reason than self-gratification fox with Clooney’s voice. Even more vexing is the fact that way too many other scenarios/events/things in general were unnecessarily added to the story. The confusion caused by this was exacerbated by jerky camera work, too-quick dialogue, and an overall speed of unfolding action which doesn’t allow for the audience to have any time to actually empathise with the characters. This inevitably made them simply annoying and two dimensional.

I don’t understand why people will massacre such a great work. Obviously the original story is good, otherwise why would anyone get any funding to turn it into a film? So why, why would the same people who agree (and probably fight) to get the story retold on screen then turn around and, for lack of a better term, fuck with it? It makes no sense to me. And this time, it was extremely personal to me because, one, Roald Dahl is still one of my favourite authors, and two, ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ was one of my favourite childhood stories, I must have read it about five times. I’m probably not the only one who has such fond associations with this book, and hence I’m probably not the only one who is insulted, embittered and altogether pissed off at yet another Hollywood fail which has slaughtered another classic children’s story through some intellectually snobbish, yet altogether wrong, attempt at ‘revisionism’. For those of you who haven’t subjected your kids to this try-hard movie yet, don’t. Stick to the book, it’s way better.