Michael Fox

The scores of composer Michael Fine are born from his improvisations on the piano and are nourished by his travels and his readings: his music derives from a poetic imagination and carries therefore lots of visual evocations. From Korea and its palaces (At the Gate) to Scotland and the writer Alexander McCall Smith (Brother Fox), the world and its landscapes pass by over the seasons (Seasonal Rites) as you listen to it.

Director: Wes Anderson
Cast (voice): George Clooney, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Meryl Streep, Michael Gambon, Willem Dafoe, Brian Cox, Adrien Brody, Roman Coppola, Garth Jennings, Owen Wilson

It is the story of one Mr. Fox and his wild-ways of hen heckling, turkey taking and cider sipping, nocturnal, instinctive adventures. He has to put his wild days behind him and do what fathers do best: be responsible. He is too rebellious. He is too wild. He is going to try "just one more raid" on the three nastiest, meanest farmers that are Boggis, Bunce and Bean. It is a tale of crossing the line of family responsibilities and midnight adventure and the friendships and awakenings of this country life that is inhabited by Fantastic Mr. Fox and his friends.

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.

For more than a millennium, the fox has been a ubiquitous figure at the margins of the Japanese collective imagination. In the writings of the nobility and the motifs of popular literature, the fox is known as a shapeshifter, able to assume various forms in order to deceive others.