Perception vs Reality in Fantastic Mr. Fox
Although what some would consider a box-office “flop”, Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox serves as what many know today as one of the best stop-motion films ever created. However, beyond amazing cinematography and George Clooney’s even more amazing voice acting, Fantastic Mr. Fox was created in a way that also oils our epistemological gears. Specifically, its stop-motion animation style and its very distinctive directing choices invites the audience to question perception and reality; how truths are filtered through the movie-viewer experience and how visual storytelling itself can reveal and distort what is and isn’t real.
To start, the film’s stop-motion animations, filled with deliberately jittery and hand-crafted aesthetic, immediately reigns to the viewer that the world on screen is constructed (physically and literally). By making the choice to avoid hyper realistic CGI foxes, the visual world of Fantastic Mr. Fox doesn’t try to feed you a false reality or hide its artificiality, but rather tries to draw attention to its fabricated nature. Mimicking how our own perceptions are filtered through frameworks such as memories, biases and even language, this aligns with the epistemological problem that sometimes what we see (aka what we perceive) may not truly be what is reality.
Another detail that speaks to the theme of perception versus reality, is the repeated shots of close-ups on characters’ eyes; a cinematographic motif that represents individual subjectivity and personal reflection. By showcasing the eye swirls of Kylie during moments of confusion, the meaningful stares of Mr. Fox in moments of fear or realization, or the eyes of Mr. In Fox's family, in moments of intimate conversation, the eye shots become a metaphor for how all individuals have different perceptions of reality based on their own unique experiences, moral codes, prior knowledge and interpretations. What this does for the audience, is that it challenges viewers to recognize that even within the moral dilemmas portrayed in the film such as Mr. Fox’s heists and the farmer’s retaliation tactics, both sides of the coin always exist (eg. there are multiple perspectives in each of which someone different is “right” or “wrong”).
Overall, through its animations and visual motifs, Fantastic Mr. Fox engages with the philosophical tension between perception and reality highlighting how there are always various versions of the truth and how, despite the movie clearly not depicting reality but rather something authentically “fake”, we are urged to find our own interpretations based off of our perceptions of the storytelling taking place in the film. Fantastic Mr. Fox remains overall quite objective, not trying to trick us with false perceptions, but telling the story that highlights the different versions of the story and of reality experienced by different characters, and simultaneously, you as the viewer. This openness offers not certainty but curiosity and an invitation to question how we know what we know when it comes to Mr. Fox and this incredible story that has been brought to life.
