George Clooney’s smooth Mr Fox is in theory a mild-mannered newspaper columnist. Something about pitching a film at children has put the charm and innocence back into Anderson’s comic style. Yet the Fox family attend an all-American high school over the hill, with a sports coach voiced by another Anderson repertory regular: Owen Wilson.īut even this cultural disconnect is all part of the general zaniness – which I confess I had found annoying in Anderson’s last film, The Darjeeling Limited, but which here is nicely judged. The local village appears to be from Olde Englande, with a pub and red post boxes, and the sound made by the local cider press is exactly like the textile lab in the Ealing classic The Man in the White Suit. The baddies, led by a trigger-happy meanie voiced by Michael Gambon, are Brits. Patriotic British filmgoers may, however, be disconcerted to note that with Mr Fox being voiced by George Clooney, Mrs Fox by Meryl Streep and their moody teen boy by Jason Schwartzman, the good guys are American.
He takes the story of the Fox clan and their battle against three agribusiness villains – Boggis, Bunce and Bean – and reimagines this feisty family as exactly the sort of amiably dysfunctional yet pin-smart bunch that he depicted in The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. With co-writer Noah Baumbach, Anderson has created a movie with that oddball quality that I associate with both him and Michael Gondry: a quirky-homespun aesthetic with a meticulous foregrounding of knowing detail.
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