Fantastic Mr Fox - WFS Film Fest screening - booking

PG (Coarse language)

As part of our 80th Anniversary Film Festival weekend, Wellington Film Society is putting on a screening of Fantastic Mr Fox. We'd love for families to come along to enjoy this film together so are opening up this screening only to non-members. Tickets are free. Seats are unallocated, just enter the cinema on the day and find a seat. We start films on time and do not play trailers.

BOOKING DETAILS

We will make all seats bookable because we’re enabling members to bring guests and non-members to attend.

The point of opening this screening up to the public this is to enable children to have a fun film experience so please act in this spirit. You can book up to five seats as part of their booking, but we ask that they don’t book more seats than they need to ensure as many people can come as possible.

FILM DETAILS

The final day of our weekend-long celebration will kick off with Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, representing the 2000s.

The impeccable stop-motion caper uses Roald Dahl’s classic novel as a jumping off point for a ‘fun for the whole family’ banger that just happens to dabble in Anderson’s pet themes. Sure, there’s a complicated parent-child relationship at its centre, but it’s also a movie where adorable animal puppets undertake a heist to liberate and redistribute the ill-gotten gains of a trio of farmers. Leading the crew is Mr. Fox, a role that allows George Clooney to basically reprise his title role from the Oceans trilogy—the only difference being that his team of experts are all woodland creatures voiced by Anderson regulars.

Fantastic Mr. Fox fits nicely into a slate of films about ‘playing the part’. Dahl’s work has often benefitted from adaptation by an artist who is able to temper his mean-spiritedness (see also Matilda and both film adaptations of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). For Anderson, this means taking a book that tends towards essentialism and fill it with characters trying to overcome their ‘wild animal’ natures to do something fantastic.

“Children, especially, will find things they don’t understand, and things that scare them. Excellent. A good story for children should suggest a hidden dimension, and that dimension of course is the lifetime still ahead of them.” – Roger Ebert