Fantastic Mr. Fox (Blu-ray) (2009) - Oscar ® Nominee!

"You don't want to watch this movie, you want to climb inside it and play.  Dana Stevens, Slate
"Witty and wonderful, Fantastic Mr. Fox is the perfect Thanksgining entertainment...  Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer
"You don't want to watch this movie, you want to climb inside it and play.  Dana Stevens, Slate Magazine
"A pleasantly cerebral experience, exhilarating and fizzy, that goes to your head like too much Champagne.  Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

Editor's Note With this animated adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic, director Wes Anderson moves from quirky films for adults, such as THE DARJEELING LIMITED and THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, to imaginative children's fare. THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX reunites Anderson with previous collaborators Bill Murray and Cate Blanchett, and it marks his first work with Oscar winner George Clooney.

	Bill Murray - Voice
	Meryl Streep - Voice
	Jason Schwartzman - Voice
	Owen Wilson - Voice
	M. Wallace Wolodarsky - Voice
	Michael Gambon - Voice
	Eric Anderson - Voice
	Willem Dafoe - Voice
	Jarvis Cocker - Voice
	Helen McCrory - Voice
	Wes Anderson - Voice
	Wes Anderson - Screenwriter
	Noah Baumbach - Screenwriter
	Wes Anderson - Producer
	Allison Abbate - Producer
	Jeremy Dawson - Producer
	Scott Rudin - Producer
	Arnon Milchan - Executive Producer
	Steven Rales - Executive Producer
	Tristan Oliver - Cinematographer
	Alexandre Desplat - Composer
	Roald Dahl - Source Writer
	George Clooney - Voice
	Wes Anderson - Director

Rolling Stone
"[Clooney] is tone-perfect in a movie that deserves to be called groundbreaking." 09/17/2009

Box Office
4.5 stars out of 5 -- "A witty script, brilliantly animated with stop motion techniques and wonderfully voiced by a cast led by George Clooney and Meryl Streep make quirky director Wes Anderson's first foray into 'toons a major winner and a total delight." 10/12/2009

Variety
"So old-fashioned as to look like something brand new, the stop-motion-animated FANTASTIC MR. FOX is as recognizably a Wes Anderson film as any of his previous features." 10/14/2009

Total Film
3 stars out of 5 -- "From lovely scenes with Ash and Kristofferson to Owen Wilson's cameo as a PE teacher and, yes, the clothes, this is very much a Wes Anderson film..." 10/01/2009

Entertainment Weekly
Included in Entertainment Weekly's "The Best Films Of The Year" -- "Anderson uses primitive analog magic to reinvent the innocence -- and the surprise -- of what an animated feature can be." 12/25/2009

Los Angeles Times
Included in Los Angeles Times's "Best Films Of 2009" -- "FANTASTIC felt like the avant-garde rebel out to stir things up." 12/20/2009

Chicago Sun-Times
Included in Chicago Sun-Times's "The Ten Best Animated Films Of 2009" -- "Wes Anderson's landscapes and structures are picture-booky. Yet the extraordinary faces of his animals are almost disturbingly human..." 12/24/2009

Uncut
"Here, you might easily find yourself marvelling at a helicopter shot of a spread of fields, all immaculately woven together from different types of fabric like a patchwork quilt..." 10/16/2009

Entertainment Weekly 10 of 10
Who'd have guessed it? Wes Anderson, creator of the rascally stop-motion fable Fantastic Mr. Fox, turns out to be born to make animated films. I say that with a bit of mischief, because I'm not a big fan of Anderson's work (Rushmore, The Darjeeling Limited). What I now understand, though, is that in essence, he's always been making cartoons; he just confused the issue by putting real live actors in them. Before, he twisted reality into a permanent ironic pose. Now, in the infectiously primitive talking-animal world of Fantastic Mr. Fox, he's become an ironic realist...Freely adapting Roald Dahl's 1970 children's book, Anderson creates an endearingly tactile fairy-tale thrift-shop universe, with quaintly painted backdrops, cotton balls for smoke, and a family of foxes who move in such deliberate fashion that, up close, you can see the hairs on their faces bristle and jerk. Yet Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney), Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), and their son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), inhabit a world that's disarmingly, well, lifelike. There are jokes about flipped real estate (they move from a hole to a tree ? i.e., an upscale condo), plus a very unchildlike soundtrack powered by the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones. As a hero, Mr. Fox has the arch self-possession to insist to his wife that he poaches poultry ''because I'm a wild animal.'' Against her wishes, he plots to rip off a trio of evil farmers, and the film turns into a modly surreal, underground-burrowing heist yarn, with Clooney as self-mockingly sympathetic as he is in the Ocean's films. With its virtuoso tomfoolery, Fantastic Mr. Fox is like a homegrown Wallace and Gromit caper. To Wes Anderson: More, please! - Owen Gleiberman

Salon.com 10 of 10
There should be something incongruous about the sound of George Clooney's cashmere-flannel voice coming from the mouth of a somewhat rangy-looking fox in a country gent's corduroy suit: Why should a matinee idol suffer the indignity of being trapped in a puppet's body? But from the first minute of the Wes Anderson stop-motion-animated feature Fantastic Mr. Fox, Clooney is that creature, the genuinely fantastic Mr. Fox of the title, a rapscallion charmer who wears many hats: husband, father, newspaperman, chicken thief. It's one thing for an actor to feel comfortable in his own skin; it's another for him to feel completely at home in the body of a fake-fur and metal-armature vulpus vulpus. And yet Clooney's naturalism is of a piece with the joyous, marvelously detailed movie around him, adapted from Roald Dahl's novel with adventurousness and seemingly boundless love by Anderson and Noah Baumbach. Fantastic Mr. Fox is possibly the finest picture about family, community and poultry thievery ever made...Fantastic Mr. Fox is an intricately detailed and accomplished piece of work. (It amazes me that 2009 has brought us not just one but two dazzling stop-motion-animated pictures, the other being Henry Selick's gorgeous and spooky Coraline, adapted from Neil Gaiman's equally terrific children's novel.) And yet what's wonderful about it is how casual and free, how un-fussed-over, it feels. Anderson is clearly taking a stand against the strained realism (make that "so-called realism") of digital animation, up to and including the repellent motion-capture technology that has turned the once-fine filmmaker Robert Zemeckis into a zombie. And in the end, Anderson's picture is more wondrous in the ways that count, more palpably believable within its fantasy world, than anything Dreamworks and -- yes, I'll say it -- Pixar (with the notable exception of Brad Bird's projects) has come up with...As a work of animation, and of art, Fantastic Mr. Fox is wily, clever and mischievous, without ever being too arch or knowing. It also has the distinct aura of something that's been made entirely by hand with care and affection -- a few misshapen nubs here and there only add to the charm. Anderson has pulled off the most elusive of goals: He's made a nonchalant masterpiece, a movie that feels dog-eared and loved before it's even reached our hands. - Stephanie Zacharek