Wes Anderson gets me every time. . .

Wes Anderson has this knack of choosing a song and pairing it with a simple scene so that your heart is suddenly pulled by nostalgia and you feel almost a little bit devastated by it. In The Royal Tenenbaums he did it by pairing Vince Guaraldi’s Christmastime is Here from A Charlie Brown Christmas to the scene where Royal takes Margot out for ice cream. In his new film Fantastic Mr. Fox, he did it by pairing the song Love as sung by Nancy Adams from Disney’s animated film Robin Hood with the lazy afternoon scene where Mr. Fox is lolling under their tree while Mrs. Fox paints a picture and the young foxes are diving and swimming in their tiny pool. The song was playing so quietly in the scene that it was almost unnoticeable, but I was immediately struck by its haunting familiarity and my brain scrambled to identify it. I couldn’t stop thinking about that song for the rest of the film. I knew it was Disney, but I couldn’t place from which film it came. I thought maybe it was from The Fox and the Hound, which would make sense, but the fact that it comes from Robin Hood, where the classic hero is played by a fox, makes even MORE sense. Even though Mr. Fox is a creation of Roald Dahl, Wes Anderson’s version of him could definitely be a direct descendant from Disney’s foxy Robin and with the inclusion of this song, I like to think that Wes is admitting that. I loved Fantastic Mr. Fox. It was unique as an animated film, but fully, wonderfully, obviously a Wes Anderson film. He may have found his true medium.

Here is the scene in Disney’s Robin Hood that features the lovely song: