Fantastic Mr. Fox 4K 2009 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

Angry farmers, tired of the sly fox's constant attacks on their chicken coops, prepare to destroy their enemy and his "sly" family.

Review 4K Movie

The best young director of our time tried his hand at animation. In reality, this is not so easy. Of all the famous film directors, the only one who manages to make both amazing films and cartoons is Tim Burton (and even he started out as an animator). Anderson's experiment was definitely a success. Like Burton once did, he chose a children's story by Roald Dahl for his adaptation. “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is a witty adventure comedy full of subtle (Anderson's trademark) humor, rejecting the conventions typical of modern cartoons.

The characters have undergone some changes compared to the literary source material. For example, the main characters have only one fox cub, but the villains are the same, and the drinking rat is evil, no matter how hard Ratatouille tries to ennoble this animal. Wes didn't even bother with the dog (and Hollywood has recently become obsessed with dogs), here the dog has rabies and is not the traditionally kind and fluffy animal. The most enjoyable moment of the cartoon is when the predators have their victims, although the moment when the duck is dismembered is not shown, but feathers fly everywhere. The director acted wisely by not depriving the film of a minimum of cruelty, otherwise, in Ice Age, the predators didn't eat anyone.

While working on the cartoon, Anderson did not ignore his signature theme of family. Mr. Fox has family problems: his son Ash does not get along with his cousin, Ash has problems with his peers and is not successful in sports, which upsets him. The natural-born hunter from Dahl's fairy tale gives up his dangerous craft for a long time (at his wife's insistence) and gets a job writing columns for a newspaper. But the fox's hunting spirit cannot be taken away, and sooner or later he will go back to business. These episodes are filmed amazingly, with the fox and the possum, wearing masks, heading towards the farms. The possum character is a necessary silly element.

After causing material damage to the farmers, the film begins to take on a more action-packed tone, with chases and tunneling. Anderson turns the hunt for the fox into absurdity, employing excavators and flooding burrows, while the family problems in the spirit of the director are complemented by the housing problems of the characters in the film.

The home occupies a special place in Anderson's work. In The Royal Tenenbaums, the home was a gathering place for a broken family, where they could remember the good moments in their lives and enjoy new ones. In The Life Aquatic, the characters' home was a ship traveling in search of sharks, and in The Darjeeling Limited, it was a train compartment. In this animated film, Anderson relocates animals from the beautiful nature of the hills to the city sewers, where, in theory, they cannot continue their wild life. The concrete jungle has never appeared in Anderson's work before; it seems that he is wary of this place where people become hostages to the fast pace of life and forget their origins. Anderson managed to adapt the animals to the harsh living conditions in the urban environment.

I would particularly like to mention the film's music and cinematography. You can't shake the feeling that you are watching a live-action film rather than a puppet cartoon. Fast and long shots alternate; when the characters' faces are shown in close-up, it seems that the film's budget is larger than stated, even despite the less than optimal image quality. This point should be taken as a jab at our distributors, who, at the time of writing this review, do not have the cartoon in their plans, but this does not detract from the cartoon's value. “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is a positive, kind cartoon without the naivety inherent in many other modern animated films. The moral of the story is in the spirit of Anderson, for whom home is traditionally a place where friends and loved ones are. Wherever that place may be, be it distant India or the sewers.