Happy Trails Hans: Fantastic Mr Fox
Great to see you again, Hans! Gruber is back and he’s getting in touch with his animal side to review the trailer for Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animated version of Roald Dahl’s classic.
‘And so it begins.’ It begins with a talking fox reading a newspaper. Is this another trailer for Antichrist? ‘Welcome to the fantastic world… of Mr Fox.’ I suppose it’s fantastic if you think animation that was out of date 20 years ago is fantastic. ‘His life is fantastic.’ Is it? It looks like he works in a supermarket. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not very fantastic. ‘His wife is fantastic.’ In fairness, his wife is Meryl Streep, so that is pretty fantastic. ‘His neighbours are not so fantastic.’ Oh, they’re humans and they drive mechanical diggers, that’s why. Do you think this film is going to have an underlying environmental message?
‘But they’re about to discover… (Man, why are people always about to discover something in trailers?) … he’s one fox you can’t out-fox.’ Ah, clever. Fox and his gang of talking animals are going to carry out a break-in. Fox is George Clooney. It’s Ocean’s Eleven meets Wind In The Willows. With crappier animation.
‘This Fall… forget super… ignore incredible… it’s all about Fantastic.’ Let’s hope it’s better than Fantastic Four. Hang on, there’s a distinct lack of Britishness to this adaptation of a classic British book from a great British writer. Why not set it in New York? Wouldn’t that be more fantastic?
It does look fun, though.
VERDICT: I’m going to count to three. There will not be a four
Ross v Ross 
August 5, 2009 at 11:49 am
very nice vdo i like it .
August 6, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Crappy? Quaint?
I’ll concede that I quite like the animation. I do like the fact that it ain’t from Roald Dahl, it’s from “The author of Charlie and the Choclate Factory”. Who says reading is a dying art? They might as well have said, “it’s from that book wot was a Johnny Depp film”.