Blu-ray of the Day: Fantastic Mr Fox

Voices: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Michael Gambon, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson.
Director: Wes Anderson.
Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach.
Score: Alexandre Desplat.
Cinematography: Tristan Oliver.

The Fantastic Mr Fox opens with the frustrated Mr Fox: a decade of domestic drudgery with the wife and kid has him hankering for the old days of chicken stealing, but to scratch that itch he has to bet the farm … This enchanting and endlessly surprising stop-motion romp brilliantly cross-pollinates the storytelling genius of Roald Dahl with the filmmaking idiosyncrasies of Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited, The Royal Tenenbaums). To sustain a movie, Anderson and his Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou collaborator Noah Baumbach had to expand considerably on Dahl’s slight tale. “But I don’t remember it being much of a struggle,” Anderson says in the 45-minute making-of extra (there’s also an essential Beginner’s Guide to Whack-Bat, “the sport that’s taking the woodland by storm”). “It almost felt like the book was ready to be a trilogy.” Scenes and characters have been created, and at times the tone is less Dahl-esque than an inside joke for the Anderson-ville camp. While the result never quites lives up to the sum of its parts, Fantastic Mr Fox does live up to its title, and — in high definition — looks even more fabulous.

Movie: 😀 😀 😀 😀
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