Once again, the thing that stands out of Desplat’s work here is the attention to detail, the orchestration, and the compositional technique. Fox is raucous and ebullient, and takes a great deal of inspiration from Ennio Morricone’s more offbeat works. Rather than being a restrained and romantic, Fantastic Mr. Fox is about as zany as mainstream film music gets, and will certainly surprise those whose opinion of Desplat’s is based only around his work on his more successful Hollywood scores – Lust Caution, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Painted Veil, and so on. Fox is the perfect response to those who criticize Desplat for being a one-trick pony, who can only write pretty little waltzes and clinical orchestral lines with no heart and soul.

Fox is a wild amalgam of styles and influences that places songs by everyone from The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones to Burl Ives, two old Georges Delerue pieces, and a new score from French composer Alexandre Desplat, writing music for his second animated film after Le Château des Singes in 1999. Fox, a pair of wily and cunning animals who feed their family by stealing chickens, ducks and cider from under the noses of three despicable farmers named Boggis, Bunce and Bean. The story – as is always the case with Dahl’s work – is a dark morality tale dressed up as an innocent children’s story. Fox, written by Dahl in 1970 and which has now been turned into an animated feature film by directed Wes Anderson with a voice cast that includes such luminaries as George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Michael Gambon, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, and Jarvis Cocker from the English rock band Pulp. Strangely, the one Roald Dahl story I don’t think I ever read was Fantastic Mr. I grew up reading and loving Roald Dahl’s stories everything from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches and The Twits to The BFG, James and the Giant Peach and Matilda, his words (as well as Quentin Blake’s incomparable illustrations) were an indelible part of my childhood, and remain beloved to this day.

Fantastic mr fox 1970