A thread for Wes Anderson's "The Fantastic Mr. Fox"

i.e. I'm not prepared to lump this in with Spike Jonze's thing I haven't seen

i dunno, when mrs. fox says "i should have never married you," i mean i guess the off-the-cuffness and the contrast to the storybook visuals is supposed to give it a surprising emotional oomph but it left me cold.

if it helps eric i haven't seen the spike jonze thing either haha

yeah, i had no problem late-arriving on that particular movie

also the way he shoots conversations with each character looking straight into the camera in the middle of the frame bugs the hell out of me

i found it weird that he's taken on a totally new medium and genre and subject and method of filmmaking and yet it still feels weirdly unambitious... like he's just content to do his thing with the fonts and the beach boys and the nice outfits and make sure we all know it's a wes anderson movie

this trend of grown-up directors making children's book movies where every character acts like an emotionally tortured wacky indie rocker is just too much already.

― 311 is a joek (s1ocki), Sunday, November 29, 2009 6:04 PM (36 seconds ago) Bookmark

what, two frickin movies? how is that a played-out trend?

would agree in theory that wacky indie kids' flix should suck, but this was way better than yr (perfectly fair) capsule description makes it sound. then again, i never became disconnected from the story & characters.

thought the "i should never have married you" line worked very well. not as a big emo stomach kicker, but as a rather poignant and honest moment. no big deal, but nice.

The Wes Andersonisms didn't really move the entire thing one way or the other for me. I simply thought it was at least as good as a Wallace & Gromit movie. And that was enough.

ya tbh i'm not sure exactly WHAT bothered me about this movie that i should have in theory really liked! just trying to unpack it a little. i certainly didn't hate it, and i enjoyed probably about 50% of it... but then it just lost me somehow...

Plus, the movie seemed in on the joke that despite the kid's whining the Fox household reminded me of the Huxtables, i.e. the husband loved his frostier wife more than hanging out with his child.

might wanna consider that wa's stylistic hallmarks could be more than wallpaper applied to things in order to remind us that he is he. an artistic reflection of his interests, taste and pov, f'rinstance.

tbh, i'd like to see a bit more variety in that regard myself, cuz it's true that he doesn't seem to be growing/exploring/experimenting much as a filmmaker (beyond the obvious technical challenge of making a stop-motion film), but i don't think his surface style is disconnected from deeper content.

ya i guess it just bugs me that his particular "trademarks" don't always serve the film first and foremost... like i just felt a bit overwhelmed by them. and it didn't really feel dahl-ish at all, which it didn't HAVE to, but that would have been nice.

i can't help but think of tarantino, or michael mann, who are also always revisiting their obsessions and their stylistic fixations but who still seem to do something new or surprising or fresher every time.

i haven't seen this movie yet but i get the impression sometimes that wes should just be a set designer or something and leave the story to someone else

but this was one of my favorite books as a kid, so i will be seeing it

Do you want him to grow and experiment as a filmmaker (I think he is in Fox, btw, insofar as he acknowledges that the animated film puts his limitations in their most attractive context)?

Most mainstream Hollywood stuff is so awful that I understand looking at Anderson, PTA, Coppola, Jonze, and so on as figures around whom equal parts provocative ideas and twaddle cohere, but the pressure to look at this crew as Great Filmmakers is oppressive.

It is admittedly a thematic step backwards after the end of Darjeeling, in which he seemed to finally acknowledge that his stylistic attitude was at a dead end.

i see it more as an artistic restatement of core strengths & principles after the disconnected, running-on-fumes mess that was the darjeeling limited. in that sense a bit safe, but it's a safety that's 100% appropriate to a big bucks kids' flick. i really liked how back-to-basics anderson it was. showing that he can still do what he does, showing that he can control a narrative without wilson as a creative partner, and showing that his aesthetic can both appeal to mainstream audiences and actually serve a story.

ymmv, of course...

Depends on how "back-to-basics" you think Anderson needed to go; the guy reveled in his limitations as far back as Bottle Rocket.

well, i mean back-to-basics in that the story and style very closely resemble both rushmore & the royal tenenbaums, though packaged in a more family-friendly manner. in that light:

"the animated film puts his limitations in their most attractive context"

otm

i guess i felt like in darjeeling limited he WAS doing something kind of new. not breathtakingly new, and not really on the thematic level, more on the stylistic and narrative levels. but new enough that i didn't really feel like he was just repeating himself. and the one excruciatingly "Wes Anderson" detail--the stylized louis vuitton luggage--was such that it almost felt reflexive.

relative to what i meant, both the darjeeling limited and the life aquatic are experimental films, in that they find anderson attempting to employ his basic narrative and visual devices in a somewhat novel context - and both films fail to some extent, imo. they both seem watered-down and emotionally disconnected.

i suppose mr fox is experimental in exactly the same sense, but here the experiment is successful, largely because he's always been making nostalgic children's films - or young adult films, anyway - and here he finally admits it.

(I think he is in Fox, btw, insofar as he acknowledges that the animated film puts his limitations in their most attractive context)

i haven't seen it yet but this is what i was thinking, too. however, i don't think that is incompatible with saying that he isn't growing or that he's moving towards being more of an art director than a director. i mean, don't the links up thread basically say that his "technical" involvement with the animation was very, very limited? like, he just gave 'em storyboards and specs and said have at it?

xpost

and it was the most crushingly obvious metaphor for all the stuff he felt like he was dragging around with him. i didn't love darjeeling, but it did feel like a conscious struggle with his own arrested development, an acknowledgment that he had these same themes he couldn't avoid repeating. i haven't seen mr. fox and i want to, but even just the fact that he's gone and made an animated film of a children's book feels like sort of a lateral move -- not pushing past any of his own boundaries or obstacles, just sort of taking a break from them at most. but having done that, it'll be interesting to see what he tries to do next. he can't keep making man-boy movies forever. or can he?

I'm the regressive one. I recognized Anderson was trying to do something different with Darjeeling but didn't much like it. In this case, I recognize that this is very much the animated version of Tenenbaums and isn't really doing a whole lot I haven't seen before (from either Anderson or Nick Park), but I enjoyed it a ton.

(oops my post was an xpost to the post about the LV luggage)

i guess i've always imagined that he heavily storyboarded ALL of his films (they're so formal), so animation is kind of a move towards what the rest of his movies have suggested

so basically what contenderizer said?

he's always been making nostalgic children's films

most OTM thing in this thread, probably

'll be interesting to see what he tries to do next. he can't keep making man-boy movies forever. or can he?

That's what it looks like! When I saw The Royal Tenenbaums I thought, "Oh, Jesus, here we go again."

btw most of the crew of Serious American Directors I cited a few posts above are man-boys, including the one girl in the group (i.e. her films center around boys and girls of privilege, and I like hers best).

there was a fair amount of andersonian detail in the darjeeling limited. relentlessly symmetrical framing, contrasting colors, suitcases & contents, various diagrams and typographical announcements, traveling shots through the train, absent parents & wayward/shellshocked offspring, thoughtless dreams of romance with someone from another world, etc.

agree that it did was somewhat less reliant on his typical visual devices, and that it seemed to struggle against his characters' narcissistic inertia, but i found it such a failure as a film that it's hard to see this progress as positive.

most of the crew of Serious American Directors I cited a few posts above are man-boys, including the one girl in the group (i.e. her films center around boys and girls of privilege

this is probably why Ramin Bahrani's films are so much more appealing than any of these SADs; he's interested in underprivileged people forced to grow up.

but I'm still psyched about seeing Mr. Fox tomorrow!

btw no "The" in title

(waiting for freebie)

Finally saw Goodbye Solo this weekend

(xpost)

what you guys need to see is "historias extraordinarias." blew my dome open like no other movie in the past long long time.

btw most of the crew of Serious American Directors I cited a few posts above are man-boys, including the one girl in the group (i.e. her films center around boys and girls of privilege, and I like hers best).

ha, true. here's where i say, i wrote a book about that. tho i also included linklater and haynes, who are more "mature" in various ways. (and david o. russell, who may or may not be.)

well wouldja look at that!!

cool!

yeah, it's ok. it coulda/woulda/shoulda been better. but that whole thing of trying to grow up, what that means or how to do it, was an obvious theme to tie together a lot of that group.

John K.'s h8rtacular post on this cracks me up hard.

saw this today, enjoyed it pretty much start to finish, whether despite or because of andersonisms gets sort of hard to day past a point.

it's a really imaginative movie. and pretty funny too.

hard to SAY past a point...

yeah it's kind of both, I mean I rolled my eyes a little when the Beach Boys came on because it's so predictable Wes Anderson but OTOH Heroes and Villains is a great song and that was a great scene

The models on this drove me nuts because half the time they didn't have proper elbows and knees! Sometimes they bent like proper joints and others their arms and legs curved like pieces of macaroni. Sometimes it looked like they had proper quality armatures & others like they were built around the unyielding wires found in Gumby and Pokey toys.

The characters weren't really built to make facial expressions, either. Any reaction shot where a character had to pull a face totally took me out of the moment. Half the time I only knew what type of face they were supposed to be pulling due to context & musical cues. Also their crying = freaky eye leakage was wrong. People blink when they cry, they don't just drain fluids everywhere.

I thought it was a decent movie & the human characters were good at facial expressions. I bet the animals could have made more readable, nice-looking expressions if Wes Anderson hadn't imposed constraints on them. I felt so bad for the animators after reading that article linked upthread where they talked about all these stupid demands Wes made.

The characters weren't really built to make facial expressions, either. Any reaction shot where a character had to pull a face totally took me out of the moment. Half the time I only knew what type of face they were supposed to be pulling due to context & musical cues.

this, completely.

But that's ok, cuz in Anderson's human movies the actors aren't built to make facial expressions either.

any link to john k's blog should be accompanied by a porn-style disclaimer that he is a complete lunatic.

fantastic! at the moment, my fave US film of the year and the first great animated film I've seen since The Iron Giant.

I felt so bad for the animators after reading that article linked upthread where they talked about all these stupid demands Wes made.

nb: fuck animators.

^^^ this. buncha whiny bastards.