Fantastic Mr. Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation | Release Date: November 13, 2009 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
83
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 34 Critic Reviews
Positive:
32
Mixed:
1
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Village VoiceScott Foundas
For the reportedly painstaking labor it took to create, the film is a marvel to behold--with wonderful shifts in perspective, an intensely tactile design, and an intentional herky-jerkiness of motion that only enriches the make-believe atmosphere. Read full review
100
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
With its virtuoso tomfoolery, Fantastic Mr. Fox is like a homegrown Wallace and Gromit caper. To Wes Anderson: More, please! Read full review
100
SalonStephanie Zacharek
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. Read full review
100
SlateDana Stevens
You don't want to watch this movie, you want to climb inside it and play. Read full review
100
Philadelphia InquirerSteven Rea
Witty and wonderful, Fantastic Mr. Fox is the perfect Thanksgiving entertainment. Read full review
100
Chicago ReaderJ.R. Jones
The result is an instant classic. The material allows Anderson to neutralize the most irritating aspects of his work (the precociousness, the sense of white-bread privilege) and maximize the most endearing (the comic timing, the dollhouse ordering of invented worlds). Read full review
90
The DissolveScott Tobias
Fantastic Mr. Fox may be his most purely pleasurable film to date, evoking the Dahl books and Rankin-Bass productions that so transported him as a kid. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterSheri Linden
Anderson has created a world as stylized and inventive as anything he's done... "Fox" is a visual delight. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
Endlessly enchanting. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
A pleasantly cerebral experience, exhilarating and fizzy, that goes to your head like too much Champagne. Read full review
90
The New York TimesA.O. Scott
In some ways his (Anderson) most fully realized and satisfying film. Once you adjust to its stop-and-start rhythms and its scruffy looks, you can appreciate its wit, its beauty and the sly gravity of its emotional undercurrents. Read full review
90
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
A captivating entertainment for the holiday season and well beyond. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleKimberley Jones
This is an animated film that happily has room for both an existentialist dread of death and a grinning joie de vivre. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter Travers
An adventure in pure imagination that plays to the smart kid in all of us. Read full review
88
New York PostLou Lumenick
A gorgeous and witty piece of stop-motion animation. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchStaff (Not credited)
Most of all, it’s a magical feat, one that turns puppets into personalities and an English meadow into Anderson’s world. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeTy Burr
By forgoing actual human beings, the director has made his most charming, least annoyingly fey film - a thing of lovely comic wisdom. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
These animals aren't catering to anyone in the audience. We get the feeling they're intensely leading their own lives without slowing down for ours. Read full review
83
Christian Science MonitorPeter Rainer
Has its pleasures, foremost being its look – a sophisticated puppet primitivism backdropped by near-psychedelic colorations. Read full review
83
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
For all the ostensible immaturity of its form, Fantastic Mr. Fox is the most grown-up thing the director has done in years. Read full review
80
EmpireIan Nathan
Genuinely original: a silly, hilarious and oddly profound adaptation for adult-sized children. Read full review
80
VarietyTodd McCarthy
The film's style, paradoxically both precious and rough-hewn, positions this as the season's defiantly anti-CGI toon, and its retro charms will likely appeal more strongly to grown-ups than to moppets; it's a picture for people who would rather drive a 1953 Jaguar XK 120 than a new one. Read full review
80
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
The result is a visual treasure that successfully blends deadpan quirkiness with a wry realism rarely seen in any film, let alone one for children. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubTasha Robinson
This is no more a kids’ movie for kids than "Where The Wild Things Are"; it’s a film strictly for Wes Anderson fans of all ages. By now, they should know who they are. Read full review
75
USA TodayClaudia Puig
It's an intriguing match of material and filmmaker. Dahl's distinctive, edgy storytelling seems to fit well with Anderson's idiosyncratic worldview and visuals. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
If there's an argument against the film (and, admittedly, it's not much of an argument), it's that the movie may not be suitably childish to appeal to younger viewers. Read full review
75
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
Mr. Fox's old-fashioned, hand-crafted animation is one of its main attractions. Another is Anderson's whimsical, dry humor, a natural for this tale of a crafty, dapper fox. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleAmy Biancolli
Anderson injects such charm and wit, such personality and nostalgia - evident in the old-school animation, storybook settings and pitch-perfect use of Burl Ives - that it's easy to forgive his self-conscious touches. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn Hornaday
Fantastic Mr. Fox imparts lessons as profound as "The Road's" about love and gratitude and awareness of others. It just has more fun doing it. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
The tale may be Dahl's, but there's a whole new wag to it – this is decidedly, weirdly and, at best, wonderfully a Wes Anderson movie. Read full review
75
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike Scott
Even though it's right there in the title, "fantastic" might be a touch hyperbolic in describing director Wes Anderson's stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox, but only by a whisker. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
I’m flummoxed as to why the movie left me feeling up in the air, as opposed to over the moon. Partly, I think, it’s a matter of how Anderson’s sense of humor rubs up against that of the book’s author, Roald Dahl. Read full review
60
Time OutKeith Uhlich
It’s unfortunate that the result is so unaffecting, especially in light of all the things the director does right. Read full review
20
Film ThreatMatthew Sorrento
The animals are often caught in a stare as if they, too, are looking for the tale that Anderson forgot. Read full review
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