Not So Childish

The best thing about Fantastic Mr. Fox? Director Wes Anderson liberates commercial animated cinema from the limits of children’s movies. With Henry Selik’s Coraline and Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, this amounts to the most noteworthy film movement of 2009—striking a necessary blow against Pixar’s brainwashing, which has dictated most people’s expectations of what animated movies should be. Anderson’s roguish bon vivant Mr. Fox (title character from Roald Dahl’s 1970 children’s book) exceeds his wild animal nature, going past cute anthropomorphism to question traps set by humans and defy mankind’s exploitative farm industries. Read more