Fantastic Mr. Fox Reviews

With Friday’s release of Fantastic Mr. Fox in New York and Los Angeles, tons of reviews are pouring in. We’ll try and keep tab on most of them here, positive and negative, and will update as more appear. Excerpts below, full reviews at the links to the left of them. At the time of posting, the film had an 87% at Metacritic, and a 93% at Rotten Tomatoes. To see a similar round-up of UK reviews from a few weeks back, click here.

New York Times, A.O. Scott – “So “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” which Mr. Anderson wrote with Noah Baumbach, and which he has been hoping to make for many years, is in some ways his most fully realized and satisfying film. Once you adjust to its stop-and-start rhythms and its scruffy looks, you can appreciate its wit, its beauty and the sly gravity of its emotional undercurrents.” Critic’s Pick

Fresh Air (NPR), David Edelstein – “For all the engineering behind The Fantastic Mr. Fox, it still feels handmade, as if the artists were in the room, manipulating everything onscreen. When it ended, I wished they’d come out and take a bow: animation director Mark Gustafson, cinematographer Tristan Oliver, designer Nelson Lowry, the whole team. And of course Wes Anderson, who for the first time has a right to preen.” (Edelstein also reviews the film for New York Magazine)

Village Voice, Scott Foundas – “For the reportedly painstaking labor it took to create, the film is a marvel to behold—with wonderful shifts in perspective, an intensely tactile design, and an intentional herky-jerkiness of motion that only enriches the make-believe atmosphere”

Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman – “Who’d have guessed it? Wes Anderson, creator of the rascally stop-motion fable Fantastic Mr. Fox, turns out to be born to make animated films.” Grade: A

Variety, Todd McCarthy – “Much is being made of reports that Anderson was not physically present during the film’s actual making in London, that he directed by remote links from Paris. Whatever the case, Anderson’s indelible imprint is on every frame here, more for better than for worse.”

The A.V. Club, Tasha Robinson – “Dahl’s short book is a simple adventure about a vain fox at war with three grumpy farmers. The film version, co-scripted by Anderson and The Squid And The Whale’s Noah Baumbach, keeps the story but expands it with complicated familial conflicts.” Grade: B

Time Out New York, Keith Uhlich – “The overall sensation is of an artist repeating himself, scaling down his obsessions to empty-vessel miniature—at last, Anderson has made a film that is nothing but a succession of autumn-gold shoebox dioramas.” 3/5 Stars

Salon.com, Stephanie Zacharek – “There’s so much to look at, and to giggle over, in “Fantastic Mr. Fox”: It has style and wit and heart, without ever being overly whimsical, a trap Anderson has too often fallen into.”

New York Press, Armond White – “Fantastic Mr.Fox affords a refined, witty, recognition of the processes that convert fantasy into art.”

Slant, Nick Schager – “Given its canny beauty and quick wit, Fantastic Mr. Fox seems primed to also burrow into issues of self, uniqueness, and community as dexterously as Mr. Fox and his clan dig holes, yet Anderson prizes the funny over the profound to an extent that keeps the proceedings a tad too light and jovial to register as anything more than a lightweight aside to his more acute, earnest work.” 3/4 Stars

Associated Press, Dave Germain – “The wisecracks in Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach’s screenplay often are hilarious, as is the slang the animals use to cuss like sailors.”

Cinematical, Todd Gilchrist – “[T]he director doesn’t merely assemble and all-star cast, he creates an all-Anderson one, maximizing the impact of each contributor’s personality in a way that seems too seldom employed in animated films.”

Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan – “The painstaking process known as stop-motion animation has brought all kinds of things to life, from that big ape King Kong to the very British Wallace and Gromit, but in the playful and funny “Fantastic Mr. Fox” it goes those feats one better: It reanimates filmmaker Wes Anderson’s career.”

New York Daily News, Elizabeth Weitzman – “Few children’s authors have refused to talk down to their audience as resolutely as Roald Dahl. So it’s no surprise, and perhaps a relief, that Wes Anderson’s adaptation of Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is just as likely to appeal to adults.” 4/5 Stars