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The 15th anniversary of Wes Anderson’s ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’: Cultural endurance and the art of adaptation

A conversation with Barnard professor Danielle Dougé and a look behind-the-scenes reveals the qualities that make “Fantastic Mr. Fox” a timeless adaptation.  

Artwork by Kathy Cao/The Barnard Bulletin

February 2, 2025

This past November marked the 15th anniversary of Wes Anderson’s autumn-hued, whimsical, and effortlessly fun “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” released in 2009. A film beloved by many and a recurring recommendation every fall season, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” deserves a revisiting not colored by nostalgia. How has it held up 15 years later? What has lent the film its staying power in cultural conversation? How does it still manage to tug at the heartstrings of watchers of any age?


Before addressing these questions, a little background seems necessary. “Fantastic Mr. Fox” was originally written by Roald Dahl and published in 1970. The story follows Mr. Fox, a shrewd and sneaky anthropomorphized fox, as he steals from the farmers who live near his family’s burrow. When the farmers get fed up with his swiping of their produce, they vow to hunt him down, eventually surrounding his burrow and preventing him from leaving. Using his wits and memory, the fox instead burrows beneath the farms and gathers enough food for a feast, avoiding the farmers and providing food for all of the creatures also living underground. The novel ends with the farmers still waiting for Mr. Fox to leave the burrow. Try as they might, humans (farmers or otherwise) cannot outsmart a fox; after all, being crafty and cunning is the animal’s nature. 


What struck me was how simple the novel was compared to the film. With the movie’s star-studded voice acting cast (including George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, and Willem Dafoe), expert stop-motion animation, Academy Award-nominated score, and screenplay written by filmmaking giants Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson, the film adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox is nothing if not a production. But is that all it takes to create a film with the staying power of  Fantastic Mr. Fox


To help me answer this question, I interviewed Barnard Film Studies term assistant professor Danielle Dougé, who is teaching a course titled “Adaptation.” On what makes a good book-to-film adaptation, Dougé said that the film must “understand the thematic core of its source text and understand how to develop and expand that theme into other aspects of cinema.” Recreating and complicating the feeling you get when you read the material you’re adapting is at the essence of a good and faithful film adaptation. 


What made “Fantastic Mr. Fox” a particularly challenging adaptation was the fact that its story was taken from a children’s book and made into a film that addressed a much wider age range. To do this, Baumbach and Anderson expanded on the book's core theme of one’s nature. Dougé says that “what Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach do is take the theme of ‘what is this creature’s nature’ and graft it onto the protagonist in a way that is more elevated and complex.” Through this film, we see how Anderson and Baumbach are masters at writing dimension into simplicity without abandoning that simplicity’s thematic core. 


As restrictive as the book can be story-wise, Dougé believes that it also left more room for Anderson to be exploratory in his filmmaking: “It really freed up his style and visual language that he likes to use, and out of the other Wes Anderson films I’ve seen – and he has a distinctive style, sort of that austere and restrained yet pointed camera movement – what adapting this book allowed him to do is marry form and content really well.” Put simply, form refers to the look of the film, its composition, color, space, and visual techniques; content is the film's story, its themes, and, in this case, its source material. An example of this is Anderson’s use of stop-motion, which evokes both the flatness of Dahl’s children's book illustrations and the 3D-ness of breathing filmic life into that story.


Dougé continued to return to Wes Anderson’s inclusion of humor and tongue-in-cheek dialogue that are entertaining while still advancing the main plot: “This film does a lot of purposeful play, which just comes from really understanding and loving the source text. You can feel how loved the text is because of these moments of purposeful play.” The love and attention dedicated to the original “Mr. Fox” novel that Professor Dougé gets at also lends the film its staying power. Anderson absolutely embraced everything about the source material and its author. Saying that, they intuitively interpreted Mr. Fox as a projection of Roald Dahl himself, Anderson, and Baumbach and tried to channel as much of his energy and life into the character. “We spent time at his house while we were writing,” said Anderson in an interview, “and a lot of the details of his found their way into our story and into our character.” Anderson wrote much of the screenplay in a little shed in the orchard and wound up rebuilding a miniature of the space to be Mr. Fox’s office in the film. He also took the liberty to name Mr. Fox’s wife, a character who is only referred to as “Mrs. Fox” in the novel, Felicity, after Dahl’s second wife. 


In terms of iconic aesthetics of the film, Anderson dipped into earlier drafts of the book. “He said, ‘I’d like the look of the film to be like Donald Chaffin’s illustrations,’” said Felicity Dahl in the same interview. Chaffin was the first illustrator of “Fantastic Mr. Fox. The production crew even went so far as to contact Chaffin so that he could visit the set and give input on the carefully constructed scenery. The film ended up with 120 unique sets, all crafted by hand to perfect Anderson’s vision of the novel come to life. “We can spend 24 hours placing small props on the edge of frames and making sure things have got the right design, paint on them, things like that. That’s a very Wes thing,” said Tristan Oliver, the director of photography for the film, also from the same interview. Imbued in every scene is care and consideration for Anderson and, on a macro level, Dahl’s vision. More than anything, it seemed that Anderson, and by extension the rest of his crew, went about the adaptation with the utmost respect for the source material and its creator. 


“You can tell he really adores that text and what it means and what it’s trying to do,” said Professor Dougé on what has kept the film so charming. “It’s so earnest.” In a world where so many film adaptations and remakes are clear cash grabs, there is so much to be learned from Anderson’s treatment of “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Its cultural endurance is a testament to the rewards reaped from respecting a good story and cherishing the feelings it inspires. 

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