• Great Family Film Poll: The Fantastic Mr Fox

    From Your Name@21:1/5 to All on Fri Mar 25 18:10:09 2016
    Over the Christmas / New Year holiday time the New Zealand Herald
    newspaper ran this series of articles with journalists giving their
    suggestions for New Zealand's favourite family film for The Great
    Family Film Poll. This is the last of them ...


    *The* *Fantastic* *Mr* *Fox*
    Rather than delving into the memorable movies of my
    childhood - the terrors of The Dark Crystal, the
    excitement of The Empire Strikes Back - I'm going to
    cheat a little here.

    Wes Anderson's The Fantastic Mr Fox is the film I'd
    most like families to enjoy together out of anything
    this side of The Force Awakens (and substantially
    less scary).

    The pic includes some of my favourite memories of
    childhood - stop-motion animation; talking animals;
    the great Roald Dahl - but does so with a modern
    sensibility (albeit through the same melancholic,
    nostalgic lens as Anderson's live-action films).

    The Fantastic Mr Fox also benefits from elements I
    love as an adult moviegoer. It's the idea of an
    auteur that may have seemed crazy on paper, and even
    more difficult to execute, when second (or even sadder,
    third) rate CGI drivel is churned out of servers the
    world over. And it brings the oddball artistic
    sensibilities and compulsively-conveyed themes of the
    OCD Anderson to bear on a family favourite much more
    successfully the Spike Jonze managed to do with Where
    the Wild Things Are.

    But mostly, The Fantastic Mr Fox is a magnificent
    family film for some pretty simple reasons - it's the
    fun, adventurous and sometimes frightening tale of an
    extended family of adorably cute woodland creatures.

    The bonds of familial love they share are what the
    characters can draw on, along with clever craftiness,
    when going up against the nasty human farmers of the
    pic, and help to make this not just a film that the
    whole family can enjoy, but they can in particular
    enjoy together.

    Am I pushing things I love from my childhood on kids
    here? Absolutely. But they're much less likely to roll
    their eyes at a film made in the last decade than
    something from the early 80s.

    Bonus - George Clooney plays a fox (calm down ladies,
    not that kind of fox).

    - Steve Newall, Flicks.co.nz Editor
    12 January, 2016

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