The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Welcome back to Cineplex 14. It has been a weird week, and thus I haven’t had as much time lately to watch movies. I’ve been doing a lot of babysitting. I assisted an elderly woman with making photocopies. My girlfriend, Tandra is having knee pains and will be going in for surgery on Monday. We watched Beetlejuice and it took us about 4 days to finish it. But finally, I got around to seeing the next movie on the roster.

I decided this time to watch and review the movie based on the book by the great Roald Dahl, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. We went to see it in a small theater with not that many people attending. I wasn’t sure if I would like it or not, being that I had only seen one trailer a long time ago and I had no idea what it was even about, so I went in clueless (I feel it’s better to watch a movie fresh).

So the movie began and we’re introduced to Mister and Misses Fox. Mr. Fox is a chicken thief and one day, the two of them get stuck in an animal trap due to Mr. Fox’s arrogance. Mrs. Fox then informs him that she’s pregnant and if they survive that he needs to go into a different line of work.

Two years pass (twelve fox years) and they have a son named Ash. Mr. Fox is a columnist for the local newspaper, Mrs. Fox is a landscape artist and Ash wants to be an athlete in school. Mr. Fox then goes and buys a tree because he’s tired of living in a hole, and they take in their cousin Kristopherson, because his father has ‘double pneumonia’.

The tree they live in is across from three farm’s owned by three evil owners named Boggis, Bunce and Bean. Mr. Fox then teams up with an opossum named Kylie and they start a ‘master
plan’ to steal Boggis’ chickens, Bunce’s ducks and geese and Bean’s alcoholic turkey cider.

So Mr. Fox goes through with his ‘master plan’ and the three farmers start chasing all of them underground and into the sewers. They keep meeting up with different animals who are on the run too because the three farmers have destroyed the forest.

You know, the plot really wasn’t that deep, and it was fairly short at an hour and fifteen minutes. The acting was pretty good. There were excellent performances from George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Bill Murray. The animation definitely took some getting used to. It was almost like a mixture of claymation and puppetry.

Overall, a pretty good film, not ‘fantastic’ as the title suggests, but it was still good. Definitely a family friendly movie that all the kids would love and probably beg for their own Mr. Fox after it was over. I give it 7 out of 10.

Just on a side note, I’ve got a lot of new ideas for Cineplex 14, such as doing seven movies is seven days of the same genre (I’ll have polls when it gets closer as to which genre YOU, the reader, would like to see me do most), then going the next week and doing a different genre.

Sometime in the future, I plan on doing a 100 movies in 100 days, so watch for that. Keep reading for more updates.