Fantastic and Wild, Part 2: Fox as Ruth

(Part two in my four part Fantastic Mr. Fox/Where the Wild Things Are longform. A little late, hopefully not too short. Coming soon: Maurice Sendak as syncopated master-poet!)



Translation is an act of love; but as anyone who has ever been in love will tell you, love is not enough.

This goes double for movies. Take the Lord of the Rings films, in which a series of flawed, but narratively masterful books are bear-hugged by a project so bloatedly faithful that the end effect is like having to sit through a piano recital by your best friend's daughter: sure, she's talented, and sure she's cute; but in the end all you want is for Gandalf to stop - talking - so -damned -slowly, and kiss a Hobbit. That he can't, and won't, of course, is one of the limitations of fidelity - for where most works of art are free to follow their own involutions, translations have their hands tied. As such its tricks are limited, so much so that the phrase "the book was better" is as unsurprising to us as saying that so-and-so author is more X (interesting, beautiful, musical) in his original language.

The exceptions to this platitude can tell us a lot about being faithful. When the books version of the fantastic Mr. Fox finds himself and his family trapped by the three farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, he decides to dig. His wife watches him spring to action:

"Slowly, Mrs. Fox got to her feet. She was suffering more than any of them from the lack of food and water. She was very weak. 'I am so sorry,' she said. 'But I don't think I am going to be much help.'
'You stay right where you are my darling,' said Mr. Fox. 'We can handle this by ourselves.'" (p. 28)

What are we seeing here? A happy family. More specifically, a happy family in a children's book. Mrs. Fox's suffering is like a heavy cold, and her polite attitude to her husband evidence that, even under duress, the family unit will function like a body, with the father as the brainy head, the mother as the beating heart, and the children as the, uh, frantically-digging paws.


Compare this to the same scene in Wes Anderson's movie version of Fox. After asking "to have a word" with him, Mrs. Fox tells her husband that she's going to lose her temper. "When?" he asks. "Right now," she says, before slapping him across the face. With the sharp, but gorgeously pointed facets of a mineral deposit glittering behind her, Mrs. Fox asks her question:

"Mrs. Fox: Twelve fox years ago, you made a promise to me, while we were caged inside that fox trap, that if we survived you would never steal another chicken, turkey, goose, duck or squab, whatever they are, and I believed you. Why - why did you lie to me?
Fox: Because I'm a wild animal.
Mrs. Fox: You are also a husband, and a father.
Fox: I'm trying to tell you the truth about myself.
Mrs. Fox: I don't care about the truth about yourself. This story is too predictable.
Fox: Predictable? Really? What happens in the end?
Mrs. Fox: In the end? We all die. Unless you change."

So many things differ between these two scenes that it seems almost pointless to say what, other than the two characters involved, they share - but I think that Anderson is actually sticking closer to the spirit of his text than we think. In his version, Mrs. Fox is harsh and accusatory; Mr. Fox "honest" and self-deceiving. But they are still husband and wife. The scene is, like its original, a picture of a happy family; except that now, the word "happy" has been translated out of the language of childhood in which it originally appeared, and into the language of adulthood. Happy, as derived from the middle english "hap", which denotes a balance that is precarious but also durable, like a stick balanced on the end of your finger. The stick moves, you move; you move, the stick moves. The Fox couple fights without resolution; but they persist. Mrs. Fox's fidelity to her husband includes confrontation, because it is based on an idea of a relationship that goes beyond cordiality and into intimacy, where we give and take the capacity to hurt because it makes the person we give to or take from important, even unique. Because of this, the scene speaks to an adult in a way that the book's version can't.

Think of the many ways that this could have gone wrong. In an over-loving version, Dahl's emotional choreography is repeated step for step, and the movie is at best a good kids' movie, at worst an adults' movie that treats its audience as if they were emotional idiots. On the other hand, the version that replaces the spirit of Dahl's scene with a word of its own is unloving - meaning careless, butterfingered. A translation that thinks too much of itself and too little of its source, or decides that what it is doing is "better for everybody". Neither of them will be rewatched, at least by me. Stay with your man out of nostalgia, stay with your woman because you want to feel like a master of the universe. There are a thousand ways not to fall in love. But fidelity means (strangely enough) being willing to change.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox succeeds because of its mix of fidelity and daring. It is a fairy tale, like its original; but the world that it is trying to explain is the adult's universe of consequence, rather than the child's world of courage. In order to do this it has to find common ground: the "master language" of human experience behind both.

Fantstic and Wild, Part 1: Escaping Safely

(this is part one of a four-part discussion of adaptation, movies, kids books, and Generation X, among other things. It uses the recent movies The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Where the Wild Things Are as a starting point. Part 1 is on the various book versions of TFMF. Part 2, which looks at the opera- and stage versions, as well as Wes Anderson movie and cinema in general, should go up by Wednesday. Part 3, on Maurice Sendak, should be ready by Friday, and then (fingers crossed), I'll round it out with part IV this weekend. Please feel free to post responses along the way, and enjoy!)


The Fantastic Mr. Fox is a story about doing: a hymn to action whose main character succeeds, like Tom Sawyer, no matter what obstacles are put in front of him. In part, this is what makes his book so wonderful to kids - for as the French philosopher Alain writes, "Courage is the king of fairy tales and the god of childhood". Children, who are terrified all the time, and who therefore have a very good idea of what "being brave" means, want bravery to be a skeleton key that opens any lock; so, as soon as Mr. Fox is menaced, he sits and thinks. Then he has an idea. Then the idea is translated from his head out into the world of action. The transition between each of these stages is smooth, even flawless, leading us to assume that the two languages - thought, and action - are less separate languages than dialects, or even accents, like British and American English, whose occasional differences of pronunciation are cause more for gentle awkwardness (or at worst a misunderstood street name) than any real disaster.

Donald Chaffin's illustrations in the original Alfred P. Knopf publication (1970) of TFMF only emphasize the essential harmlessness of Mr. Fox and the world he lives in. With his soft, inexpressive eyes, frozen smile and teapot-shaped head, this version of our hero is less like a drawing of an actual beast and more like an icon: a sticker peeled off its sheet and placed against a series of autumnal landscapes. His double-breasted waistcoat is always impeccably clean, even after an afternoon of hard digging - but then this is exactly the point, since dirt in this fox's world is not a dense element that must be dealt with in order to succeed, but a sort of second atmosphere, as civilized and malleable as butter.

Such heightened domesticity is of course a staple of children's literature, which works to transform the hard world that children experience into a sort of gigantic rumpus room. In Dahl's book this impulse is most obvious in the plot itself, which summons Boggis, Bunce and Bean like a trio of evil clowns and then knocks them over without once making us feel that they might actually manage to harm our hero or his family. Throughout this, Chaffin's cozily undramatic pictures (the foxes appear to be smiling even as they "frantically" try to escape from an approaching bulldozer) form a perfect accompaniment: a sort of light jazz for the hospital waiting room of the story.

It is interesting to note, however, that on his way to this placidity Chaffin glosses over those moments of nose-picking grotesquerie that are the calling card of Dahl's prose. The book's descriptions linger over the three farmers like a schoolboy picking through entrails: Bean's smile is "sickly", showing "more gums than teeth"; he pulls "something black and hard out of his ear" and tosses it in the grass. Bunce eats donuts filled with goose liver paste. The trio are physically disgusting - and then, though this atmosphere is missing entirely from the pictures, it creates an interesting tension in the book as a whole: as if what we were reading was not one, but two stories, which agree in places and disagree in others, like a pair of old men squabbling over a single story.

Such stereoptic storytelling may seem strange in what is supposed to be a straightforward story - but as master illustrator and children's book writer Maurice Sendak says, it is actually normal - exemplary even. For Sendak, the "picture book" (as he calls it) is by its very nature a hybrid, in which text and image dance around one another with a freedom that is, perhaps, the most childlike part of it. The task of the author/illustrator is therefore not to downplay this interaction, but to encourage it. As Sendak says in an interview with Walter Lorraine:

"You must not ever be doing the same thing, must not ever be illustrating exactly what is written...You have worked out a text so that it stops and goes and stops and goes, and the pictures become so subtle, too, that quite independent of the words they tell their own side of the story. The illustrator is doing a tremendous job of expansion, collaboration, of illumination." (Sendak, Caldecott & Co., p. 186)


Given this potential for interplay, one of the most interesting things about rereading (or watching, or listening to) TFMF in its various interpretations is the chance that it gives us to see how illustrators over the years have changed the work, emphasizing or downplaying certain elements depending on their own visions and temperaments. In Quentin Blake's translation, for example, Dahl's fox sprouts pan legs and stiff, wing-like coat-tails, not to mention a coat of fur that looks like it was scratched onto him by a particularly dreamy fifth-grader. The paint-box water-coloring gleefully overrun its outlines, giving each picture a happy, anarchic feeling, like a doodle whose energy and wildness have been rendered harmless by the controlling figuration of the characters. In turn, the Mr. Fox we read about in this book is wilder, freer: less the super-effective aristocrat of fate and more the cockney jobber. His success is the fool's success and therefore lovable, though perhaps less parentally endorsable.

Comparing these two characters raises the inevitable question: who is the real Mr. Fox? Is it Chaffin's wall-hanging, or Blake's sculpted snot-chunk? Sophisticates may scoff - but anyone with children will understand the importance of this point, which unfortunately only gets more complicated the more we look into it. Puffin will publish two more versions: a Chaffinesque saga with a beautiful, moonlit cover by Jill Bennett, and the more Blakean "young reader" version by Tony Ross, in which Mr. Fox looks like a cross between Elmo and Bart Simpson. The drawings are excellent; but in each of these cases, the illustrators, like their predecessors, conceive of their protagonist through one of two personas: the mischievous trickster, or the Victorian gentleman. Confusingly enough, the text supports and contradicts both - which is important, since it in turn illustrates for us the way that Dahl's writing is itself already syncopated (to use one of Sendak's terms): not a pure stream at all, but a muddy river of twigs and branches and seeds, which flows, sure, but also eddies, to the delight of its readers and profit of its interpreters.

Counter-intuitive though it might seem, this narrative syncopation is one of the real reason why kids like Dahl so much - for no matter what strain its illustrators choose to pick up on, TFMF retains two basic tools: the reassuring and protectively regular plot (Dad), and a giggling, distractible, body-obsessed description (Dad's boozing, lazy, no-good brother Tom). The reader gets to have her cake and eat it too, laughing at the descriptions of the triumphant Mr. Fox launching belch after celebratory belch without having to worry that his joy de vivre might cause him to do something excessively vigorous, and so overflow the conventional outline of his cage/house.