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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