Fantastic Mr. Fox

I'm a little worried about Wes Anderson painting himself into a corner. Perhaps you are less concerned, given that Anderson has just departed from live action to release his first animated feature, which happens to be the most unique marquee picture of the year and, as an analog stop motion side scroller, runs rather contrary to prevailing aesthetics. Perhaps now more than ever the Anderson brand seems to you a wildcard.

You haven't been paying attention. Wes's world, like Dudley's, is distinctly and marvelously his own, but from the moment Dignan cuffed a bittersweet farewell in the prison yard it has been subject to an inexorable crayon-drafted procedure for geometric collapse. Fantastic Mr. Fox is the squared, boxed, folded and flattened final product; a wonderful dead end.

Bottle Rocket was the first and last time there were open spaces in an Anderson film — the unbound prairie of his home Texas where the gang shot fireworks on the lam. Rushmore came fully framed as a stage play, complete with title curtain, and more and more Anderson has used the edges of the image to frame reality, to ontologically exclude what lies outside. Margaret Yang flies in on her remote control airplane and the boys don't notice her until she's in frame, even though she's evidently standing right next to them in the middle of an empty tarmac. They don't watch her leave either; camera cuts away and she's just gone. By the time of Darjeeling Limited Anderson had perfected the coupling of this principle to the whip-pan for comic effect. In an early sequence the brothers tour an Indian city and, repeatedly, ridiculous goings-on are revealed just off screen. So he's used framing devices to great dramatic advantage, but steadily the dimensions are compacting and the walls closing in on Dignan's confinement.

One reviewer of Darjeeling described Anderson's sensibility as miniaturist. Exactly. The Tenenbaums' dollhouse was cross-sectioned into the diorama Belafonte, then cropped into a row of boxcar viewing boxes and now compressed into slides of life in an ant farm. Unless this progression ends the next Anderson project will be the gallery exhibit of microminiature paintings from Synecdoche, New York. I miss Texas.

That said, Fantastic Mr. Fox is brilliant. Go ahead and put it alongside the collected Wallace and Gromit as the best in feature length stop motion, superior in energy and wit to anything by Henry Selick or the increasingly banal Tim Burton. (Nightmare Before Christmas is a great feat of imagination, but take a fresh look at the script and execution — aside from a few musical highlights it's rather tedious.)

As a kids movie Mr. Fox follows a trusted recipe for longevity: alcohol, tobacco and firearms. And if every instance of the word "cuss" were replaced with the corresponding vulgarity this puppy would be Restricted. Naturally the soundtrack must be owned; the customary revival of a Rolling Stones tune is Street Fighting Man. And with Clooney on board Anderson could be issuing a challenge to Soderbergh in the caper business. Here are just a few of the key ingredients: dynamite, pole vaulting, laughing gas, choppers — can you see how incredible this is going to be? — hang gliding...