Reviews - Mr. Fox yang Fantastis

Mr. Fox yang Fantastis by Diniarty Pandia, Roald Dahl, Quentin Blake

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A quick fun read about a quick red fox.
Not my favorite Roald Dahl book, but Fantastic Mr. Fox takes the idea of a fox in a hen house and creates this fun reinvention. Enter three farmers who are each horrible -- one fat, one short, and one thin. They each also raise their own kind of fowl, which Mr. Fox loves to steal for his wife and kids. One day the farmers have enough and decide to shoot Mr. Fox. However, when they ambush him, they end up just shooting off his beautiful tail! Not to be dissuaded, the farmers continue to pursue Mr. Fox who had escaped back into his underground home. First they use shovels, then machines, and finally surround the hole and vow to not leave until they kill the fox -- they plan to starve him out so they can finish him off. However, you can't outfox a fox, and Mr. Fox enlists the help of other underground creatures to dig and dig and dig to gain access to the clueless farmers' store houses and hen house. Mr. Fox ends up dining on the farmers' stores with his other underground friends and the farmers are none the wiser.
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I could see using Fantastic Mr. Fox not only as a great story about thinking on your toes and survival for elementary kids, but I think secondary kids could do a deep dive into the book (or even just the introduction) to look at how Dahl uses diction to portray the three farmers as "bad" or "evil" and Mr. Fox as the "good guy" -- even though he is the one stealing from the farmers. By looking at the description of the characters, students could understand how those descriptions and word choice help establish this opposition between the characters and also put the reader on the side of the foxes.