Fantastic Mr. Fox Review

There's a fondly remembered Steve Bell cartoon for the 'Guardian' in which, over a couple of pitch black panels, the strains of the Beach Boys' 'I Get Around' mysteriously float up from the darkness - until the lights are suddenly switched on to reveal the punchline: a bunch of singing sewer rats turd-surfing on an ocean of urine.

This brilliantly horrible image springs to mind while watching Wes Anderson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox, which also uses The Beach Boys song in a film about endangered wildlife, some rodent-shaped. If we tell you that the soundtrack also features 'Heroes And Villains', 'Ol' Man River', and 'The Ballad Of Davy Crockett', and that the film has been voice cast almost exclusively with American actors, you might begin to appreciate how far this one's strayed from its leafy Buckinghamshire origins.

Up to this point, Dahl has been unusually well served by Hollywood, from Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (both flavours), to The Witches, Matilda and James And The Giant Peach from Henry Selick, director of Coraline; a rare misstep being Quentin Tarantino's segment of Four Rooms, adapted from 'Man From The South', an original Dahl screenplay for 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents'.

It's nigh unheard of, then, for controversy to attach itself to a Dahl project, but during the lead up to this release, reports emerged suggesting Anderson and the crew hadn't seen eye to eye - literally: Anderson choosing to 'direct by email' from Paris while his animators toiled away for two years at East London's Three Mills Studios. "I think he's a little sociopathic," DoP Tristan Oliver told the 'Los Angeles Times'. "I think he's a little OCD. Contact with people disturbs him." While director of animation Mark Gustafson added, "He has made our lives miserable. I probably shouldn't say that." In Anderson's defence, this writer spent the early noughties working in Bromley-By-Bow, where Three Mills is situated, and frankly can't fault him in the least for wanting to steer clear of the place.