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davidn"Based on the book by Roald Dahl"? I suppose it could conceivably be, if you count reading the book, then eating 18 Creme Eggs before bed and typing the resultant nightmare up into screenplay format. Once again the Americans have confidently brought out their world-renowned adaptation talents to produce a version of Roald Dahl's book which makes Mr. Fox not so much "Fantastic" as "Yuppie Twat".
To be clear about this, an unmodified Fantastic Mr. Fox would never have worked as a film. So this doesn't really raise questions as to why so much was bolted on around the base storyline, as to why someone thought up the whole amalgamation at all. The anthropomorphization of the cast feels natural enough, and I thought I would be a fan of the characters and of the style of animation, but there's something weirdly uncomfortable that I felt about the whole film - all the charming details on the fur and clothing of the models manage to afford them the sum total of absolutely no soul whatsoever.
I didn't find the Hugo's House of Horrors-like undecided nationality of the film as strange as you would expect - the animals talk in American accents, but the setting is British and the farmers talk in English accents - it seems that everyone in this country qualifies as a potential villain here even if they're from Cornwall. Instead, what I found most unusual throughout the film was that characters both human and animal swear by using the word "cuss" in place of absolutely any expletive, as in "cussed up" and "complete clustercuss". And, as demonstrated, it sounds really weird. I think that I can only name Red Dwarf as an example of something that successfully invented a swear word, with the famous "smeg" - instead, this film brought back haunting memories of one-man mental asylum/game magazine Digitiser.
I really don't know what to say about it - the whole thing felt like a disjointed set of scenes from a dream (something assisted by the way that the film seems to be divided into "chapters" with titles displayed every five minutes or so before the plot starts up) - in fact, even though I think I could appreciate the unapologetic oddness of it by the time it was over, all I could remember in the end was that horribly grating whistle-click thing that he does. Smeghead.
To be clear about this, an unmodified Fantastic Mr. Fox would never have worked as a film. So this doesn't really raise questions as to why so much was bolted on around the base storyline, as to why someone thought up the whole amalgamation at all. The anthropomorphization of the cast feels natural enough, and I thought I would be a fan of the characters and of the style of animation, but there's something weirdly uncomfortable that I felt about the whole film - all the charming details on the fur and clothing of the models manage to afford them the sum total of absolutely no soul whatsoever.
I didn't find the Hugo's House of Horrors-like undecided nationality of the film as strange as you would expect - the animals talk in American accents, but the setting is British and the farmers talk in English accents - it seems that everyone in this country qualifies as a potential villain here even if they're from Cornwall. Instead, what I found most unusual throughout the film was that characters both human and animal swear by using the word "cuss" in place of absolutely any expletive, as in "cussed up" and "complete clustercuss". And, as demonstrated, it sounds really weird. I think that I can only name Red Dwarf as an example of something that successfully invented a swear word, with the famous "smeg" - instead, this film brought back haunting memories of one-man mental asylum/game magazine Digitiser.
I really don't know what to say about it - the whole thing felt like a disjointed set of scenes from a dream (something assisted by the way that the film seems to be divided into "chapters" with titles displayed every five minutes or so before the plot starts up) - in fact, even though I think I could appreciate the unapologetic oddness of it by the time it was over, all I could remember in the end was that horribly grating whistle-click thing that he does. Smeghead.
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Date: 2010-04-22 06:46 am (UTC)Not that I can talk about American accents - I met a woman visiting St Andrews with her son and they looked a bit lost so I made sure they knew where they were going. She asked if I was from America, and when I said no and that I was Scottish she told me I must have spent a good portion of my life there! I just laughed and agreed. :(
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Date: 2010-04-22 12:02 pm (UTC)I don't blame them for adding to the story, but... it's indescribably weird. The whole thing felt like I was on oxycodone again.
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Date: 2010-04-22 10:43 pm (UTC)Porridge - "naff off"
And Red Dwarf may have invented the word "smeg" but may have got it from somewhere else (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/smeg).