Word: anderson
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Director Wes Anderson was very easy to fall in love with. His debut film, Bottle Rocket (1996), starring his goofily charming friends the Wilson brothers, won him early cult status. Rushmore was built on a witty and distinctive voice, and Anderson's visual brilliance came into sharp focus with The Royal Tenenbaums, an elaborately wrapped present to a generation that wanted its own J.D. Salinger, one without the hermit-like lifestyle and creepy Joyce Maynard baggage. (See the Top 10 Troubled Genius films...
...Anderson proved easy to fall out of love with as well, as his subsequent movies became bogged down by a tendency to revisit the same themes - broken families in need of healing - and control issues that were outsize even for a filmmaker. With The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou there was the sense of being sucked into a rabbit hole dug by Anderson, and by the cloying The Darjeeling Limited, his self-indulgence had swollen to the point where the hole was too claustrophobic for any but his most devoted fans to bear...
...would think then, that a trip with him down an actual hole, albeit one dug by a family of foxes, might be pure torture. But Anderson's stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox is both a delightful amusement and a distillation of the filmmaker's essential playfulness. It's not quite tongue-in-cheek but very self-aware, in a good way. "Why yes," Anderson seems to be telling us. "I do like to play with dollhouses. And look what I can do with them. See the way Mr. Fox's fur stirs in the nonexistent breeze, isn't that marvelous...
...short, one lean (no one can say that just once). Dahl's spirit is there, but the cinematic Fantastic Mr. Fox comes fortified with Andersonian pouting, parental issues, self doubt and philosophical conundrums. "Who am I, Kylie?" Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) muses to the sidekick Anderson has created for him, an opossum voiced by Wally Wolodarksy - then clarifies: "I'm saying this as an existential question." (Read about this fall's Clooney film trifecta...
McCarthy began with an overview of the current climatic changes occurring in the Arctic, Huybers followed with a summary of Arctic climate variations during the past three decades, and Anderson closed the symposium with an exploration of Greenland’s future role in climate change...