Hi, this is Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with the Slate's Spoiler Special podcast on Fantastic Mr. Fox, the new Wes Anderson animated movie.

Joining me at the movie last night and in the Slate studio today is Jonah Weiner, Slate's pop critic.

Hi, Jonah.

How's it going?

Pretty good.

So, yeah, let's get rolling and spoiling.

Let's start with a little bit of a plot summary background on the movie.

Well, actually, let's just start out by saying, did you like it?

I did. I did. I think we both really liked it, despite the guy behind us who was laughing at every single line of dialogue, which usually makes me just hate a movie on principle.

Yeah, that is kind of disquieting, right? It sort of interferes with your enjoyment. I mean, how can you decide what to laugh at if there's just some maniac behind you laughing at everything? But in general, the audience was pretty lively and pretty into it. They were. And it was also interesting, at least anecdotally, this audience, there were a lot of kids there who a lot of them were applauding at the end. Yeah, we had two little kids in front of us about probably eight or or nine or something, who seemed completely delighted and absorbed the whole time.

So I want as closely as possible to recreate the exact conversation we had in the subway on the way home because I just thought it was great and we pretty much covered anything I would like to do in the podcast.

But let's start off first by summarizing the story. roll doll, I guess you'd call it a novel, sort of a chapter book that's about, I don't know, 70 pages long or something like that from the early 70s called Fantastic Mr. Fox.

And it's considerably embroidered from that story.

You haven't read the book, right?

I haven't.

Basically, there's a lot of adding of characters and adding of adventures and some condensation.

There's four kids. The Fox couple has four kids in the book who are just kind of the nameless Fox kids,

and they're condensed into this one son voiced by Jason Schwartzman.

But let's give it an overall plot summary.

Yeah, well, so fantastic Mr. Fox.

I think he just goes by Fox.

Did he have a first name or is he just sort of Fox?

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