Consider the great directors of cinema and what are the qualities that spring to mind? A distinctive personal imprint. Profundity and imagination expressed on every level. Stylistic innovation. But when you think back on the work of the so-called greats, don't you feel, deep in your soul, that something intangible is missing? Well, now the wily young maverick Wes Anderson has revealed exactly what was absent from Tarkovsky, Bresson, Welles and the rest: a merchandising tie-in with McDonald's. True art, it seems, can co-exist after all with moist, defeated cheeseburgers and limp, glossy French fries. I do hope Cahiers du Cinema got the memo.
Walk into a branch of the fast-food chain right now and you can pick up a Happy Meal in a carton emblazoned with images from Anderson's latest film, Fantastic Mr Fox. Inside you will find a plastic figure, modelled on one of the film's characters, which will be only slightly less pleasing to the tastebuds than the food it is helping to sell. As the company's website so enticingly puts it: "Right now at McDonald's we're inviting your kids to join our exciting mission with Fantastic Mr Fox and his animal friends."
None of which would be noteworthy in the slightest if the film in question were some DreamWorks piece of junk, or a knock-off directed by a hack. But even those of us who lost faith with Wes Anderson several films ago would agree that the director – and, one presumes, the studios with whom he works and the publicists who operate on his instructions – presents himself to the world as an auteur. His six features, from his 1996 debut Bottle Rocket through the near-perfect Rushmore and on to Fantastic Mr Fox, are characterised by an increasingly fanatical attention to detail comparable with Stanley Kubrick. If we are to believe the griping of the London crew who worked on the new picture while Anderson emailed directions from his Parisian base, he is the very embodiment of micromanagement. "I think he's a little sociopathic," the film's cinematographer Tristan Oliver told the LA Times. "I think he's a little OCD. Contact with people disturbs him … He's a bit like the Wizard of Oz. Behind the curtain."
So it would be highly unlikely that Anderson didn't know about the McDonald's deal; he may even have been required to sign off on it himself. Anderson should have followed the commendable example of Disney/Pixar, which stopped dealing with fast-food chains after the glaring contradiction of having McDonald's plugging Cars, that homage to small-town values. The film harked back to a time when America wasn't carved up by precisely those freeways which had enabled the ravenous expansion of corporations like McDonald's. By the time of Ratatouille, which celebrated culinary sophistication and artistry, the relationship was untenable. "[Disney] realised their brand really stands for something," Ratatouille's director Brad Bird told me in 2007, "and it can only be in their best interest not to align themselves with unhealthy eating. So you won't be finding Ratatouille merchandise at any fast-food outlets."
Perhaps Anderson was so fixated on the process of making Fantastic Mr Fox that he forgot that films have a life beyond the screen. Any director is diminished by such an association, but someone like Anderson in particular should not be getting into bed with McDonald's, and using his work to lure young children into destructive eating habits; it's a lose-lose situation. He looks like a chump, the film becomes tainted, and obesity levels continue to rocket. Take into account the organic, pastoral quality of the film itself, and the value it places on environmental harmony, and the tie-in looks even more misjudged. If you're going to use the blood-soaked fast-food industry to plug such a movie, why not go the whole hog and get Otis Ferry to provide one of the voices?
