Wes Anderson, a director known for the laconic preppie chic of "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "The Life Aquatic," turns his hand to animation with "Fantastic Mr. Fox," an adaptation of an idiosyncratic children's tale by Roald Dahl. Cinema has been kind to Dahl, with inspired adaptations by Henry Selick ("James and the Giant Peach") and Tim Burton ("Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"), and Anderson's contribution certainly keeps the streak alive.
Anderson flirted with stop-motion animation previously in "The Life Aquatic" — with a sequence supervised by Selick — and his decision to plunge into a feature-length production makes sense: Anderson's cinematic worlds have always revealed an obsession with style and detail, where each prop, each costume has to be just so. Animation allows the director to indulge this tendency to the nth degree with wonderfully humorous results.
Selick had been slated to be animation director for this film, but moved on to make "Coraline" instead when Anderson's film was stalled in development; replacing him is Mark Gustafson, not well known as a director yet, but an animator with a long career in claymation at Will Vinton Studios who certainly proves up to the task.