Fantastic Mr. Fox · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Anderson took his cast out to a farm.

Not a studio dressed to sound like one. A working farm, with George Clooney and Meryl Streep standing in fields and stables, saying their lines into open air while the wind and the distance got recorded along with them. Then he went home and built the movie eight inches tall on a tabletop, out of wire, fur and felt. So the soundtrack of Fantastic Mr. Fox is a document of a real place, and everything you see is manufactured. Listen for it next time. There's air around those voices that could never have come off a puppet.

That gap is the film's whole subject, and it's why Deleuze earns his place here instead of decorating the margins.

Deleuze has a name for stories built on exactly this split. He calls the mode naturalism, and the kind of image it produces the impulse-image, his oddest category, wedged between feeling and acting, where behaviour is neither an emotion nor a problem-solving deed but an appetite. A naturalist film always stacks two worlds. On top sits the derived milieu: the furnished, social, plausible surface, with clothes and manners and property. Underneath is the originary world: raw drive, hunger, dirt, the place the surface was made out of and will go back to. The catch is that they aren't two places. The originary world is what the derived milieu is standing on.

Fox lives on the top layer with unusual style. Corduroy. Tailoring. A wife, a son, a burrow with furniture in it. He is also a fox, and there are three farmers over the hill with chickens.

Now read the premise again, because it's slyer than it looks. He is bored. Not starving. Boredom is the tell. What moves him isn't need, it's drive, and Deleuze's word for an act that expresses a drive rather than solving a problem is symptom. The heists are symptoms. Dahl's fable had a fox who stole because foxes eat; Anderson's steals because he cannot tolerate the alternative, which is being an animal who has stopped. He's a middle-aged charmer who can't stop being what he is, and everyone burrowed around him pays the bill.

None of which prevents the film from running like a proper caper, and here it gets genuinely unusual for 2009. The movement-image runs on a circuit most serious modern cinema had long since abandoned: a character perceives a situation, is moved by it, acts, and the act changes the situation. In its large form, the surrounding world presses down until someone does something decisive, and everything resolves through the doing. Situation, action, new situation. The heist is the purest surviving version of that shape. Survey the farms, assemble the crew, execute, absorb the counterattack. And Fox against three landowners is Deleuze's binomial, the duel, force meeting force, the engine that drove American cinema for fifty years.

By 2009 the prestige default was the reverse: people who can only watch, endings that don't close, time you sit inside rather than move through. Anderson builds a machine where doing something still changes the world. That's a large part of why the film plays like a book read aloud at bedtime. Its physics are moral. Acts have consequences and the consequences arrive fast.

They also arrive downward. The impulse-image comes with an entropy attached, the line of slope: appetite doesn't circle, it descends. The raids provoke a siege, the siege drives the animals under, and the burrowed community goes deeper into the earth tunnel by tunnel, shedding the furnished layer as it goes. The manners come off with the topsoil. That's the joke the film stays honest about: he acts effectively, again and again, and every effective act digs the hole further down. A caper in which the successful heist is the catastrophe.

Chickens and cider carry more weight than food should. Deleuze would call them fetishes: part-objects that concentrate an entire drive, and an entire social order, into something you can hold in your jaws. Three men own the valley's produce. One animal keeps taking it and gets called a thief. The film has a clear view of who has and who raids, and never once says so aloud. It just puts a bird in a bag.

Watch how the puppet stands. A stop-motion body is made of held postures, one at a time, which makes it a natural home for the gest: an attitude that exposes a social relation rather than advancing a plot. Fox in fitted corduroy with his whiskers going is a ninety-year-old idea. Ladislas Starevich's Le Roman de Renard already had the wire-armature fox in real fur and a tailored waistcoat, ears and whiskers articulated for expression, and Anderson revives that template nearly part for part. The suit is the derived milieu, worn. The twitch under it is the originary world, and it never stops twitching.

The whole thing glows at one temperature. Corduroy, cider, turned leaves, russet laid over amber until the palette stops describing autumn and starts performing the mood, which is roughly what Deleuze means by the colour-image: a colour that absorbs the scene instead of illustrating it. It's a quotation with a date on it, too. The flocked fur and storybook diorama of Rankin/Bass's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is the mid-century fireside idiom he's reaching for.

And he slowed the sampling. Against an era selling digital smoothness by the gallon, Anderson shot at a deliberately old-fashioned frame rate, so movement arrives in fewer, wider steps. Deleuze opens his cinema books by pointing out, after Bergson, that film never captures motion; it takes equidistant samples of it, any-instant-whatever, and lets your eye do the joining. Widen that interval and you can feel the sampling occur. What fills the gaps here is a hand. The fur ripples because someone touched the puppet to move it and the touch got photographed. Willis O'Brien's Kong rippled for the same reason in 1933, fingers dimpling the pelt once a frame. The industry spent seventy years learning to hide that. Anderson decided it was warmth.

The rest of the bill of parts is equally frank. Watership Down supplied the English countryside with instinct running under the manners, the warren geography, the farmers with a grievance. Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas proved a puppet feature could hold one tone for ninety minutes and handed over the production model Anderson would take and micromanage; Selick's James and the Giant Peach had already run Dahl through the same machinery. What Anderson added was a refusal to smooth anything. He came to this after a soft patch in his live-action career and discovered, in the slowest medium available, that his instinct for the vitrine — the labelled, symmetrical, cross-sectioned frame, the closed set where every leaf is built and placed — wasn't a mannerism needing apology. In stop-motion it's just the job. Nothing enters the shot by accident because nothing can. Then the discovery ran back the other way, into the miniatures of The Grand Budapest Hotel and all of Isle of Dogs.

One thing the film leaves open, and I don't think carelessly. When it says he cannot stop being what he is, is that a diagnosis or an excuse? Deleuze can't settle it either. In the impulse-image the drive is real and the alibi is real and they turn up in the same sentence.

So watch it again with your ears first. Under the tailoring and the comic timing there's a recording of an actual field with weather in it, made for a world that doesn't exist. A film about a creature who can't stop being an animal, and the only thing in it that wasn't built by hand is the sound of outdoors.