"We must first say a prayer to the apple spirit before you shoot it off his head."
You have to tip your cap to James Cameron. Only he would have the cojones to pioneer a new form of motion capture technology while reinventing an old trompe l'oeil chestnut like 3D for the 21st Century to tell a story about the evils of modern, mechanized man and the sacrament of the natural world. Oh, the irony! Granted, that may be a more metatextual interpretation than Cameron intended, but after viewing his ten-years-in-the-making opus, Avatar, thoughts turn to things such as these.
The movie's perspective is simplistic at best: corporate men are irredeemable plunderers of earth's riches and the the blue denizens of the planet Pandora are the noble creatures who have this whole living-as-one-with-mother-earth thing figured out. Almost twenty years ago, there was a lighter hand but a similar message imbedded in the Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves. While both films are too preachy by half, Wolves still resonates today because its story is part of the fabric of our country and the performances are not filtered through a computer. Avatar is an alienating romp through a wonderland of CGI candy. For each moment of hi-tech wizardry, the movie's rock-em sock-em plot dressed up as a environmental PSA drifts further into the background. By the movie's overlong climactic battle sequence, you find yourself rooting for more amazing effects and spectacular explosions. It no longer matters who lives or dies as long as Cameron keeps delivering the goods.
Cameron has created a junkie culture. We expect each scene to outdo the previous and forget (once again) the laws of diminishing returns. We now stand on the precipice of a full-on descent into a world of prevalent 3D movies and television, and the enormous success of Avatar is to blame. As other studios scurry to cash in on the newest craze, the outlying voices expressing dissent are drowned out by the trailers for the next 3D experience. The horse is out of the barn and hurtling towards you.
Perhaps it is unfair to saddle Cameron and Avatar with such a weighty analysis, but as thoughts of the movie itself quickly evaporate into the ether, the only thing left to ponder was its cultural significance as film (Can we still call these things that?).
35 years ago, Jaws ushered in the era of the blockbuster, that special movie that captured everyone's imagination and attention to the point that film-goers would quote lines and remember every detail. Avatar is the apex of what has become more and more commonplace. It is the Roman Empire of forgettable blockbusters. As a commodity, it is a Hollywood game changer whose effects will be felt and seen in an extra dimension for years to come. As a film, it is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
"Can you dig it?!?!"
In the early moments of Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox, the propulsive opening strains of the second-tier Beach Boys hit "Heroes and Villains" accompany a 30-second scene filled with the kind of hilarious inventiveness that demands repeat viewing, and Mr. Fox is the kind of movie that will be watched over and over again in the living rooms of its fans. Even as the reality of immersive 3D visuals comes to our neighborhood multiplexes and LCD TVs, this film will stand as a testament to old-fashioned film-making for decades to come.
The movie is a valentine to the kind of stop-motion animation which for all our nostalgia, does not hold up very well today. Sorry, Rudolph. In the past 20 years, Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach and Coraline, and Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit series and Chicken Run have elevated the art to heights that Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass must have thought impossible. While not evident at first, Anderson's Mr. Fox is a different animal than Selick's spindly creations and Park's trademark putty skin and google eyes. More than his predecessors, Anderson embraces the low-tech roots of stop motion animation by not trying to wow us with a polished technical achievement as much as entertain us with a quirky and wildly hilarious story.
The movie has the look of being made in a mad genius' basement under yellowing light fixtures, and I mean that in the most flattering way. Each animal has fur that ripples with every passing frame and every character is outfitted with a unique ensemble of real clothing. This serves to remind viewers that a human hand is at work here and suspends the suspension of disbelief. While this would ordinarily have an undesirable effect, Mr. Fox achieves something in spite of this in that the characters have the look and feel of inanimate dolls that have come to life to have adventures in a perpetually autumnal landscape. There is a non-sterile, imperfect and altogether magical quality to the look of this film that evades a perfect description, and perhaps that is praise enough on that account.
As is the case with most "animated" films made in the last twenty years, the cast is a roster of well-known Hollywood names, not voice actors. Anderson regulars such as Bill Murray, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwarztman are on-hand here, and each of their deadpan deliveries which have frankly grown a bit tiresome in Anderson's live action films are given new life when uttered by badgers, foxes and other field animals. The mercurial Meryl Streep does admirable work as Mrs. Fox, in what must have been a huge "get" for Anderson, but George Clooney's voice work as Mr. Fox steals the show. Clooney's effortless cool transfers well to the titular character, and Clooney's willingness to make off-the-wall choices throughout his movie career continues to serve him well. I have often referred to Clooney as a modern Cary Grant, but I doubt that Grant would have ever lent his voice to a talking animal.
When people talk of films (as people often do), Fantastic Mr. Fox may not be referred to as a masterpiece, but it may well be viewed in career retrospectives as Anderson's finest film. The acquired taste and mopey deadpan humor of Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic has not so much been replaced by a new aesthetic as it has found a new medium, and haven't we been told for years that the medium is the message?
"We must first say a prayer to the apple spirit before you shoot it off his head."
