At every corner of my childhood life, there was a Roald Dahl book sitting around waiting to define and shape me – my morals, the things I thought to be important, the things I found to be funny, my aspirations, my likes and dislikes. Charlie and the chocolate factory was the first book I remember taking home to my parents and reading to them before asking if we could watch the movie together. James and the giant peach was the first – and last – book that made me sympathise with spiders to the point of crying: “I am not loved at all. And yet I do nothing but good. All day long I catch flies and mosquitos in my webs. I am a decent person.” I remember thinking how cruel I had been to judge so instantly, vowing to try to change my aversion to spiders because I knew I never wanted to be judged by how I looked but rather what I did – what I contributed.
Despite soon outgrowing Roald Dahl’s children’s books, having many younger siblings meant that I never ran out of moments where I had to sit and watch a children’s movie. At 16, there was another one of his children’s book lingering around prepared to change me: Fantastic Mr. Fox. There were so many moments in the Wes Anderson adaptation that stood out to me – it felt like watching the whimsiest movie about existential dread ever. A sarcastic fox who found himself, in middle age, to be frozen by the passage of time and a strong awareness of the looming future should not have been relatable to a 16 year old me but it was. I believe the brilliance of the movie comes from its ability to weigh the heavy and (ironically, human) troubles of each of the animals with the silly and somewhat fanatical ‘master plans’ of Mr. fox. And so, while each of the character’s are interesting in their own way and have many avenues of exploration, I’ll be focusing on Mr. fox here.
One of my favourite moments in the movie occurs early on and sets out Mr. fox’s motivations very clearly in a conversation he has with Mrs fox:
Mr. fox: I don’t want to live in a hole anymore, it makes me feel poor.
Mrs. fox: We are poor…but, we’re happy.
Mr. fox: Comme ci, comme ca. Anyway, the views are better above ground…Honey, I’m seven non-fox years old now, my father died at seven and a half. I don’t want to live in a hole anymore. I’m gonna do something about it.
I think both sides of this conversation are very telling of human nature and the human experience, especially pertaining to the experience of the working-class life. On one hand, there is Mrs fox who finds fulfilment and moments of peace and happiness with her current life. She doesn’t dwell much on what used to be and opts instead to enjoy all that is now: her troublesome son who tries to get out of going to school, her husband who writes for a newspaper and eats messily. She chooses to see the goodness in the life she has chosen to take and doesn’t spend her life second guessing everything she has given up.
On the other, there is Mr. fox, who wants to break out of the current circumstances of his life by reliving the past he gave up for his present. In giving up the thrill of theft, Mr. fox feels as if he isn’t maximising his potential as a fox. He says: “foxes traditionally like to court danger, hunt prey and outsmart predators, and that’s what I’m actually good at.” By giving this up for his wife and family for a domesticated life as a writer on a newspaper no one reads, he seems to feel that he is no longer fulfilling his nature or purpose. We see this reflected in the questions he asks Kylie: “Who am I, Kylie…why a fox? Why not a horse, a beetle or a bald eagle? I’m saying this more as existentialism, you know? Who am I, and how can a fox ever be happy without, forgive the expression, a chicken in its teeth?”. It is a familiar feeling depicted in his worries about identity – questioning your purpose and who you are when you aren’t actively doing the things that you should be, the things society or your human nature tell you makes you whole. Mr. fox seeks fulfilment in doing the things he was good at in his past, never looking at the person he is now and trying to learn to excel at new things. He wants to be comfortable (or ‘fulfilled’) and feels his past self is the key to this because it is a sure thing; there is no pain of changing, no pain of letting go of who you used to be when you decide to just be one version of yourself without the will to change.
The question “how can a fox ever be happy without…a chicken in its teeth?” essentially says that if he isn’t his old self, the self he knew was happy and content, he cannot be happy at all. But this is because he glorifies nostalgia too much; we know that when Mr. fox made the promise to give up the old life, he did so in a state of fear – sure that he was about to die. Now, he forgets that feeling of fear and only remembers the high of that period of his life – something we all do. Ignoring the harder circumstances of old times, friendships, relationships to focus only on the good and revelling in it, telling ourselves ‘that was a better time, I wish I could go back’. Mr fox shows us why this train of thought is never a good one, never a sustainable one, because when he relives his past and goes back to his ‘glory days’, he is met with the feelings he forgot he had felt back then – fear and a looming threat of death. Except this time it is worse, it is no longer just him and his partner in danger, but the lives of all the other animals living around him: their livelihoods, their families, their shelter and their happiness. In trying to reclaim his old self to reach his own egotistical fulfilment, he has ruined everyone else’s lives. This shows that wanting to live in the past or being stationary by never wanting to change and ‘aspiring’ for your old self is all in vain because the old times were never as good as you remember them to be. They were also filled with hardships and worries – you just choose to forget those things. And choosing not to move on while the world carries on around you makes you like Mr. fox at the start of the movie – someone who never considers that happiness doesn’t exist in bottles stored in your past but rather exists in the moments of the present that you choose to appreciate.
This brings me to my favourite passage of the movie, the one I related to the most and the one that made me love Mr. fox as a character because of how self-aware he was – taking responsibility when he saw that his selfish goals were misguided. After a cocky speech celebrating their ‘win’ over the humans, the animals are flushed with cider out of the new tunnels they had dug and Mrs fox, angry, asks: ‘why’d you have to get us into this, Foxy?’ to which Mr Fox replies:
“I don’t know, but I have a possible theory. I think I have this thing where I need everybody to think I’m the greatest, the quote unquote “fantastic” Mr. Fox. And if they aren’t completely knocked out and dazzled and kind of intimidated by me, then I don’t feel good about myself.”
At 16, I hadn’t ever watched or read anything that articulated this feeling quite so well before. For a long time, I had this feeling that if I wasn’t doing good at something at a level that impressed others or made others proud of me then I couldn’t be content. I wanted others to see me and be, as Mr. fox says, ‘knocked out and dazzled’ because it made me feel like I had accomplished something. But therein lies the problem – the fact that I couldn’t just feel accomplished because I accomplished something. Instead, I could only find that feeling when others told me I was accomplished. So this desire to be fantastic didn’t even come from a genuine goal that I was striving towards, but rather came from the desire for others to quote me as so. I am different now and keep most of my life – the good and the bad – to myself, which means that I can’t expect others to be impressed by accomplishments because they are not privy to them, but this doesn’t make the past (i.e. the times when people did see, acknowledge, reward and praise my accomplishments) any better because I wasn’t actually fulfilled by it. The memory only glows sometimes because I remember the feeling (not the actual experience) of being acknowledged.
There is definitely something egotistical about this desire to be fantastic and Mrs. fox recognises the same in her husband when he tries to talk himself out of trouble when she first finds out he’s bean stealing again. She asks him why, after he had promised never to do so again and he replies ‘because I’m a wild animal’ but she reminds him that he is more than that now; he is also a husband and a father, to which he says ‘I am trying to tell you the truth about myself’. This is innately selfish because he refuses to acknowledge who he is now (which is also a truth about himself) and everything he is made up of in the present: his wife, his son and his duty in their life is ignored to fulfill his baser instincts or need to be seen as ‘sly’ and ‘fantastic’ as his nature asks of him. Mrs fox replies that she doesn’t care about the truth about himself because the story he currently writes is a predictable one (she knows he has been here before, she was there with him and has seen the end of it with him); ‘in the end, we all die. Unless you change.’ He is forced to realise (although he doesn’t change immediately after this realisation – who does?) that seeking the thrill of his past without considering all the danger and fear and death that came with it is unsustainable and their fate can only be changed when he decides to change.
Eventually, when he reaches rock bottom (literally, in the sewers), he realises he cannot go on as he has. He tells Mrs fox that if he could do it all again, he would never disappoint her and actively starts to rectify things. He looks at his son and assures him that it wasn’t his fault that Kristofferson (his visiting nephew) is in trouble, but rather his own – showing the first steps of accountability. This is the first time he acknowledges his son outside of mentioning his ‘different’-ness. He no longer projects onto Ash the desire to see him be a caricature of himself/ his younger self but finally chooses to accept him for who he is when he says ‘Ash, I’m so glad he [the cub mrs fox was pregnant with at the time] was you’, i.e. I am happy that you are who you are.
This acceptance of the present is the first step Mr. fox takes to change, to find fulfilment through change no matter how difficult letting go of the past may be. In the end, after mr fox settles down and builds a life in the in the sewage system, he reclaims his ‘fantastic’-ness. He no longer seeks former glory but rather adapts and finds happiness in his present life; we see this when he finds an entrance to a supermarket through a drain and he shows it to his family. Mrs fox says, “you really are kind of a quote unquote ‘fantastic fox'” and he tells her: “I try”, showing that he isn’t looking in the past to find that part of himself anymore, but rather the present. In his final ‘toast’, he tells the others that their tree might not grow back, but something will – indicating that even when we start again and change, we grow into something new, something better albeit different.
The movie has many messages and many different topics it explores – all which it does well – but this is my favourite. Fantastic Mr. Fox teaches that all of the happiness associated with old memories doesn’t exist alone. There are moments of sadness and hardship we choose to forget in order to cling onto old moments without realising how dangerous it can be to not only hold onto them but to never want to grow from them. Accepting everything about now and today is important: the place you live, the people around you, the people who aren’t, the deadlines you have. Because only by accepting this truth can we look for new happiness, new memories, new moments that we want to cherish. There is no eternal emotion so the new good memories will be accompanied by new hard memories, but all are important in change and in the pursuit of contentment.
-oknaima💌