‘Because I’m a wild animal’: Nature Versus Nurture in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox

Abstract

This chapter analyses the ideological framework of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book. This film addresses various Romantic conceptions of childhood, personal and cultural history, and the natural world in relation to the self and subjectivity. In his reimagining of Dahl’s story, Anderson exhibits a disdain for the mechanization of the societal landscape and the beings inhabiting it, similar to a course charted by Henry David Thoreau in Walden, while also optimistically suggesting that animal/human ‘nature’ can still survive through aesthetic and ideological compromise and creative genius. Anderson creates a brand of ideological pastoralism to match the aesthetic pastoralism/picturesque of many of his film worlds. While the anxiety portrayed in his earlier films remains, it is somewhat defused by an anarchic yet collaborative spirit.