Buy it... on the regular CD album if you desire a faithful representation of the music heard in the film, from the plethora of likable songs from many decades ago to Alexandre Desplat's extremely perky parody score.

Avoid it... if you expect the twenty minutes of Desplat's plucky, bouncing score on the only lossless product available for the soundtrack to heal your schizophrenia, for it achieves its aim in providing a manic atmosphere for the film's characters at the expense of a sane listening experience.

Desplat

Fantastic Mr. Fox: (Alexandre Desplat) Delayed by several years of studio wrangling, this adaptation of the 1970 Roald Dahl children's novel used stop motion photography and an all-star cast to launch its way up to positions on critics' lists of top 2009 films. The clever and witty story tells of the battles of a fox and his family with three farmers neighboring his home, eventually escalating into all-out war between the three men and the vast majority of the animal kingdom. The creatures steal chickens and produce from the farmers and are forced to run an extensive digging operation to elude the extensive attempts by the humans to expose, trap, or flood them out. A series of metaphorical connections to everyday life in the human realm give Fantastic Mr. Fox its quirky charm, and in a fashion true to the spirit of the tale, the stealthy animals get the better of their enemies in the end. Despite almost unanimously positive reviews from critics, Fantastic Mr. Fox didn't become a noteworthy success story at the box office, also taking a back seat during the awards season. Nominated for an Academy Award for his efforts on the film, though, was composer Alexandre Desplat, in part a somewhat undeserving but predictable byproduct of the film's prominent use of a variety of original parody music, older soundtrack tunes, and popular songs from yesteryear. Due to Jarvis Crocker's employment as the voice of one of the characters in the film, he claimed that he wrote three or four songs for the production, though only one appears on its soundtrack album. Songs by The Beach Boys and Burl Ives dominate a soundtrack presentation that sprinkles other vintage melodies with a pair of early 1970's themes by French romance master Georges Delerue. The overall packaging, even in the film, was a challenging one for Desplat, whose contributions on the primary CD album may have only amounted to 20 minutes but do manage to maintain a basically cohesive flow. Enthusiasts of the composer will be able to seek an MP3 score-only album for a better presentation of his music alone. It had been ten years since Desplat's previous (and only other) entry in the animated genre, his mainstream career exploding in the late 2000's with a series of well-positioned assignments in the drama and fantasy genres. There is no doubt that Fantastic Mr. Fox gave Desplat a chance to toss aside his unique and increasingly consistent style of writing for such pictures and instead let loose with the intent to humorously parody several genres in the process of giving the Fox family and the pursuing farmers refreshingly silly musical representations.

While very little in Fantastic Mr. Fox may sound like Desplat's recent major works, there is a common attention to detail in a very dry mix. In its sense of fluttering movement, treble-emphasized tones, and intimate presentation, this score is definitely within the composer's usual mode of operation. Desplat departs from the norm, however, by saturating Fantastic Mr. Fox with a country spirit that ranges from twangy, plucky rhythms of simple personality to marches of a John Philip Sousa variety and a villain's theme obviously intended to imitate Ennio Morricone's famed Spaghetti Western sound (complete with Desplat's own whistling performances). Almost entirely driven by bouncing, frivolous rhythms, the score utilizes plucked strings, banjo, glockenspiel, xylophone, and puffing woodwinds to enthusiastically accompany the antics of the protagonists. Longer solo cello lines provide the thematic material for those animals as well. Never does the music become truly dark or menacing, the villains (and their evil hench-rat) treated to a timpani, solo trumpet, and snare-led march that grows out of the Morricone material to flourish as a pompous, almost swashbuckling piece complete with funny lyrics sung by a small children's choir. A solo boy soprano beautifully transforms the theme into a minute-long moment of contemplation at the end, the only real lamentation in the score. Desplat's music, in its general attitude, could give a person a nervous breakdown if not prepared for its instrumentally colorful and undeniably bright, optimistic atmosphere. Although the composer does develop two consistent thematic lines in Fantastic Mr. Fox, each dominating their halves of the score, brief cue times by necessity make the CD album experience, even with the score material condensed, a challenge. The most enticing music on the soundtrack, not surprisingly, comes from Delerue; these predictably lovely selections, despite their archival sound quality, will be a tonic for those suffering from the jitters after hearing Desplat's almost manic momentum. It's difficult to blame the composer for the absolutely unlistenable final presentation of music on the CD album for Fantastic Mr. Fox (the download-only follow-up album provided almost the complete score in early 2010, but in lossy sound), though the overwhelming innocence with which Desplat adapts his dainty, light-drama mannerisms for this assignment will alone present too big a challenge for film score collectors not friendly to the general characteristics of his music outlined at the start of this paragraph. Indeed, his approach to this concept could drive a person insane, and since that was probably the intent, it's easy to get the feeling that his one is aimed exclusively at enthusiasts of the film.   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Music as Written for the Film: ***
Music as Heard on Album: **
Overall: **

Bias Check:

For Alexandre Desplat reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.21 (in 19 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.1 (in 10,771 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.