Why Mr. Fox Had to Lose His Tail

"Did we get him?" said Bean.

"One of them shone a flashlight on the hole, and there on the ground, in the circle of light, half in and half out of the hole, lay the poor tattered bloodstained remains of.... a fox's tail." ~Fantastic Mr. Fox

Ever since I re-watched Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox earlier last week something about the movie has been bothering me. I was a child the first time I saw the film, and the feeling it gave me was one I had only ever experienced when facing things that scared me. I couldn't quite trace what it was about the movie that frightened me, except to know that it was a similar feeling to being trapped inside a closet space with no way out, or being chased by something in a nightmare. It was these types of tight, claustrophobic, and ultimately squeamish fears that the film brought back to me then, as it does now.

And yet it wasn't that Fantastic Mr. Fox was a movie that outright scared me as a child, for I had no nightmares about it, neither did it trouble my waking hours. Indeed, I could easily push the inner feeling of panic away. But then, all I had to do was think about the movie, and the gut twisting feeling would return.

I experienced a similar feeling the first time I read the tale of Peter Rabbit, who likewise narrowly dodges a bloody end at the hands of a farmer. Like Mr. Fox, Peter Rabbit loses something in the chase, and though it is not a body part, it is just as essential to his being as Mr. Fox's tail. Peter Rabbit's blue jacket and shoes are hung up on the skeletal form of a scarecrow, a formidable symbol showing just how nearly the farmer caught him. 

It wasn't until years later when I read Richard Adam's Watership Down and found myself experiencing the same feeling of panic that I began to wonder what it was about these tales that caused me to feel such fear. I found it increasingly strange that the fear I felt as a child troubled me just the same as an adult. And yet these tales are, at their core, children's tales, animal stories, full of wit and charm, and, of course, violence.

Finally, last week on my way to the grocery store, as I was thinking about Mr. Fox's tail, it hit me. The idea in itself has been in these stories all along, and so I can take no credit for them. But, in thinking about Mr. Fox's tail, I was finally able to put my finger on why these tales cause me to relive feelings of claustrophobia and cleithrophobia.

It started with me wishing that Mr. Fox could get his tail back, or better yet, that he hadn't lost it in the first place. A fox's tail is such a nice tail, after all. And the bony, fur-less tail he later gets back is so gory and ugly, the exact opposite of everything a fox's tail should be.

I wasn't sure why it bothered me so much, because it shouldn't have. It was just a tail. Only a child would wish for such a simple thing to be remedied, for such a perfect world where foxes didn't have to lose their tails.

But I soon realized that it wasn't the violent loss of the tail that left such a sour taste in my mouth, but what the tail represents. In short, what I was really wishing for was that Mr. Fox could live in a world in which bullets didn't bite so hard, in which death didn't nip so closely at his heels, and consequences didn't come in such a final form.

But consequences are hardly unique to these beast tales. On the contrary, every well told tale has consequences. Books like Game of Thrones dish out consequences to no end. And yet, even this adult story, which is so well known for its violence and brutal off-killings, didn't make me feel quite so claustrophobic and quite so fearful as Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Fantastic Mr. Fox and tales like it remain the most harsh example of consequences any children's story has ever displayed. What's more, in these tales consequences are given so very quickly. The childish "naughtiness" of Peter Rabbit nearly results in his untimely demise, a harshness which no fortunate child ever experienced. Indeed, a vegetable garden has never seemed so terribly claustrophobic as when Peter Rabbit gets lost in it; a human home has never felt so like a deathtrap as when one of these animal protagonists is trapped in it.

What's more, the animals in these stories are charming, humorous, and even bear peoplelike qualities, such as the wearing of clothes. Nonetheless, the story does not allow them to escape their animal lives, even if they do live in furnished houses and wear jackets. And, being animals, they can be killed for almost nothing. After all, in tales like Peter Rabbit characters are turned into pie, an act which literature normally reserves for the most disturbing acts of revenge, consider Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, for example. Furthermore, the animals in these stories have something the humans in them don't. They have motive, desire, wants, curiosities. Meanwhile, the humans in these stories are little more than creatures of mass productivity, with endless gardens, bird-farm empires with wire fences around them and ravage beasts to guard them. It is only after the critter penetrates them that the human's motives are revealed, and we, the reader, come to realize that their only desire is a repulsive refusal to allow animal trespassers and a revolting need to punish the animals that do.

As Richard Adams wrote in Watership Down,

"Animals don't behave like men... If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality."

Ultimately, the thing that makes animal tales of this nature feel so claustrophobic is that there is not a lot of wiggle room in them. Their world is harsher and much quicker to strike than any human one we know, for in their world there is no buffer between one mistake and another; there is no intermediary between one mistake and death. Thus, a single misstep could very easily be one too many. Indeed, death is never more than a step away, and though Mr. Fox and Peter Rabbit ultimately give it the slip, it does not miss them by much.

But like I said, the squeamish feeling leaves me as soon as I stop thinking about these stories, in other words, as soon as I return to my human life, in which death does not live so close, in the farmhouse down the hill, or worse, laying watch outside my front door.

As Roald Dahl concluded his animal tale masterpiece,

"They sat there by the hole, waiting for the fox to come out. And so far I know, they are still waiting," (Fantastic Mr. Fox).