Fantastic Mr. Fox

I love when directors actually cherish their talent to the point of trying to deliver something completely different and new. I have been a Wes Anderson fan for as long as he has been in the industry. This film was his "challenge" project. He is Mr. Independent when it comes to his scripts, but he has never done animation. Animation would be easy enough if that's actually what he did. Animation gives directors the freedom of doing things that are, in a sense, impossible in the realms of possibility. He chose poorly though. Stop Motion animation with tiny figurines seems like it would be tough, but the final product was brilliant. I knew this film would be awesome because everything added up. Clooney, Streep, Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and Wes Anderson. Mr. Fox (Clooney) is a husband and father trying to provide for his family, but when he gets up to his old ways of thieving what he wants from the local farmers, he ends up in a heap of trouble. All three farmers make different products and Mr. Fox wants them all. In the hustle of the bad situation he gets his tail shot off, which to a Fox,  means war. The farmers aren't letting up either. They come at him with all they have and they want him dead. All in all is a pretty classic movie that came from a very classic book. The absolute best thing about the film is the dialog. In particular the amount of cuss words. Not individual bad words that society has deemed "inappropriate", but more specifically the word "cuss" is substituted in the place of every single swear that could not be..... As in "The cuss you are", or "Son of a cuss", or plain enough, "Cuss you!". It is so funny to hear and it has become our new way to profess how we may be feeling when our 2 year olds are in our presence. The movie and script get an AWESOME rating, but the direction and voice work is right there in the WORK OF ART area--so here at NBM where math is taken very seriously we shall average these factors into one final rating.

NBM rates Fantastic Mr. Fox - Phenomenal