Context Statement: This paper was for my British Literature 1600-Present course. The assignment was to compare a piece of British literature to its film adaptation. I chose Fantastic Mr. Fox, a movie and book that both had a very strong influence on my childhood and my family.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox movie is a huge part of my childhood. We watched it all together as a family. And I mean ALL together, my mom’s siblings, their kids, my grandma, my parents, and my sisters. All 15 of us together on three small couches that couldn’t fit all of us, even if we were the skinniest people alive. Some of us sat on the floor, others on the couch arms, and I always had one baby or another on my lap. This is a Thanksgiving movie in our house. Every year we sit down and watch it. As the oldest sister and cousin, I read the book to all of them before bed over the course of a few days. They fell in love with it, so we read it many more times after that. It was a different, separate love than the movie.
The book is about eighty pages long, and the movie’s runtime is a little over 100 minutes. An interesting, but I think beneficial choice that the movie made was changing the children. In the book, Mr. and Mrs. Fox have four small, unnamed children. In the movie, they have one son, Ash, and a nephew named Kristofferson who comes to stay with them. The movie obviously adds a lot, because the book, being for children, is pretty simple. The movie adds a ton of information about Mr. Fox’s friends at the beginning that the book doesn’t have. In the book, Badger doesn’t show up until after he’s already been to Boggis’s chicken farm when they’re digging, about three-quarters of the way through the book. In the movie, Badger is seen within the first 10 minutes.
I enjoy that the movie keeps how Mr. Fox calls his family “my darlings”. I think that is such a loving and endearing thing to keep in. The book is illustrated, and I really love how they kept a lot of the same stage pictures. When Boggis Bunce and Bean are trying to dig the family up, they show how far down they’ve dug, and it looks remarkably similar in the movie. Fantastic visual.
In the movie, they substitute curse words for the word “cuss”. Re-reading this book, I think they made that choice because of a line in chapter 7. “Bunce was cursing the fox with dirty words that cannot be printed.” I think this is a very clever and fun choice. It’s especially fun in the movie when Mr. Fox is arguing with Badger, and they just say the word “cuss” at each other a bunch of times. I remember laughing a lot at that when I was a kid. A lot of the dialogue is pulled straight from the book. Some is slightly altered to match the film’s tone, but it’s pretty faithful in that regard. The book’s dialogue is very formal; I’m not sure if that’s just because it was written in the 70s, but the movie’s dialogue is more modern and informal. I adore the illustration style in Roald Dahl books. The movie doesn’t quite capture the whimsy of the book’s character designs, but it’s hard to do so with stop-motion. Additionally, the movie’s character designs offer a different kind of whimsy. It’s just as good.
The book ends before the movie has hit its climax. The book ends with the feast, while the movie still has almost half its runtime left at that point in the plot. I think this is a lovely ending for a children’s book to have. The closing image is the three farmers waiting for the fox in the rain. The farmers are miserable, and the animals are all joyful, eating their grand stolen feast.
This adaptation is a bit different than others that I’ve seen. This is a rare occurrence of the movie plot going into more detail than the book. Purely for that reason, unfortunately, I have to say that this is a bad adaptation, but that doesn’t mean in any way, shape, or form that I think the movie is bad. On the contrary, I think the movie is better. It’s so beautiful. The color scheme is so perfect for fall. I have a still of their tree as my phone lock screen. The cast is chock full of fantastic (forgive my pun) actors. George Clooney plays Mr. Fox, and Meryl Streep plays Mrs. Fox. The cast also includes Michael Gambon, Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and many others. It also has an incredible score. I listened to it while writing this, and it definitely elevated my experience. Wes Anderson is just a brilliant filmmaker, and his interpretation of the story is beautiful. I love this movie. I also have to take a moment to talk about how genuinely funny this movie is. There are lines that my family still laughs at every time. Whenever one of us (in most cases, a child in a sport) gets a trophy, we all quote Ash’s line,”What this? Oh, it’s nothing, it’s just some old trophy I won for being an athlete.” It sneaks up on you, too. On my rewatch for this essay, the lines, “His dad’s got one foot in the grave and three feet on a banana peel,” and “This is gonna be a total cluster cuss for everybody,” earned a big laugh from me.
I don’t know what it is about this movie, maybe it’s just how cozy it makes you feel, but every time I watch it, I feel like I’m eight years old, huddled with my sisters and cousins in my grandma’s tiny living room again.