The film that makes me cry: Fantastic Mr Fox

Mr Fox sits down to breakfast. He’s turned his back on a life of crime and now works as a columnist on a local newspaper. He wears a tie to work, he drops French aphorisms into conversation; he’s upwardly mobile.

His wife slips a stack of toast onto his plate, he tucks napkin into collar and, shunning the laid silverware, he devours it with hilarious, undignified ferocity. I like to think of Wes Anderson as quite similar to Mr Fox; they’re both dapper perfectionists, well-spoken with continental manners, but both of them have teeth, whether or not they want you to see them.

“I have a phobia of wolves,” is how Mr Fox pretentiously puts it; he says it often. What he means is, as a civilised canine, he is afraid of the primal animal that lurks beneath his gorgeous corduroy suit: his ravenous appetites, his selfishness, the danger he poses to his loved ones. I cannot imagine a more ambitious nor a more valuable subject for an animated family film – the war we’re all quietly fighting, perhaps especially as children, with the fact that we are primates.

Deep in the film’s screwball climax, Mr Fox, his son Ash and sidekick Kylie are careening down the road in a motorbike and sidecar, fleeing the psychopath Bean. Kylie glimpses something behind them and cries: “Don’t turn around!” Mr Fox, a contrarian, turns around, and the bike comes to a screeching halt at the roadside.

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Mr Fox stares with a look of childlike bewilderment into the distance, as the film’s sounds die out. From his POV we see his familiar bucolic terrain fading into a horizon of icy mountains, miles and miles away. We hear the delicate sound of a mournful choir and we see what Mr Fox has spotted: a giant black wolf, unclothed but for shaggy pelt, staring back at him from the crest of a jagged rock. Foxy bellows a few absurd pleasantries at the wolf; no answer. “I have a phobia of wolves,” he yells finally, desperately, at his distant relative. No answer.

Foxy’s eyes fill with tears; that is to say, someone from the art department dripped gum-arabic on to a puppet’s cheeks while a cameraman repeatedly photographed it. My own eyes, meanwhile, are soaked and swollen. Of course, I have been “manipulated”: a curious put-down that arbitrarily divides the schmaltz from the moving, the high from the low.

They are the adjectives routinely wielded against Anderson: sentimental, pretentious, confected, shallow, arch. Ingredients you might combine in a single cake: fake. So why have I fallen for it? How have I been so manipulated? Glycerine and choirboys aside, am I crying because a toy fox is looking at a toy wolf?

Or is it because the film that preceded this moment has deftly, undetectably, exposed a part of me that finds this meeting impossibly poignant: a civilised, domesticated individual who has made every effort to lead a sophisticated moral life, faced with the black and inescapable enormity of his own inalienable savagery?

Foxy, with all his vocabulary and trappings, has abandoned his wild heritage, but finds himself incapable of being fully human either. He is caught between two worlds, he is a man without a country, he is an adorable miniature of what Zola called “la bête humaine”. (Like Anderson, I am not particularly afraid of being called pretentious; would that our similarities didn’t end there.)

This, among many, is Anderson’s primary gift: the ability to upholster a film in magnificent fabrics through which we see – in relief rather than apertures – the shapes of terrible beasts moving around, all the more disturbing for their obscurity. The cleanliness and precision of each Anderson world – The Belafonte, Rushmore Academy, The Grand Budapest – only render more distressing the inelegant sadnesses they seek to keep at bay: self-disgust, heartbreak, grief, war.

Similarly, the vague, jaded, cock-eyed dialogue – so ill-equipped to deal with emotion – serves, through its very inappropriateness, to silhouette an inarticulable truth: we’re all wild animals, we’re all insolubly divided. Sometimes that division is funny, sometimes it’s bitterly sad.