'Fantastic Mr. Fox' Film Analysis

“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is the sixth film in Wes Anderson’s filmography and serves almost as a middle point in his career. He would have been 40 years old when it was released and 40-50 is often when adults tend to have some form of a mid-life crisis. Mr. Fox appears to be going through some form of a crisis in the film as he is tired of writing for newspapers and decides to go back to his old habits of stealing chicken and cider. Anderson in the eyes of his fans and critics, appeared to be going through some form of crisis when he decided to make a stop-motion adaptation of a famous children’s storybook about foxes since it was so off-beat from his previous work. Upon viewing the film, all of Anderson’s typical traits are present and merge with the story idea wonderfully. The character of Mr. Fox even bares similarity to Anderson himself with his iconic brown suit and presumably being middle-aged. With that, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” represents the idea of the auteur going through some form of a crisis in not knowing what he wants to do next in his film career. Mr. Fox as a character explains how he feels like he always has to prove something to everybody and that he needs to be “fantastic.” This is similar to Anderson in how his films have such a unique style with perfect symmetry. Almost as if he feels like his films need to look and be the best out of all the ones in cinema. That they need to have the idea of fantasticism. Upon fear of not knowing what is going to come next in his career, Anderson decided to do something that was different form his previous work, but he knew that with the medium of stop-motion, his visual style, and Roald Dahl’s original work, it could be fantastic.