Fantastic Mr. Fox

Directed by Wes Anderson

(PG)

***

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A fox battles against farmers.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is a “marvelous toy box of a movie,” said David Edelstein in New York. Roald Dahl’s children’s tale about a mischievous fox at war with three curmudgeonly farmers has been adapted with great affection and adventurousness by director Wes Anderson. Anderson tries his hand at stop-motion animation, and it turns out to be a match made in movie heaven. Dahl’s books have a “sort of orderly whimsy,” and the formalist Anderson is “gleefully in tune with that precision.” Never before has one of his films felt “so magically alive.” Dahl’s imaginary world turns out to be the perfect “canvas for Anderson’s visual inventiveness,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com. The genre might be new, but Fantastic Mr. Fox is very much an Anderson film, from a soundtrack that mixes Brian Wilson with Burl Ives to its cast of oddball characters that could be an all-animal version of The Royal Tenenbaums. Yet he still stays true to his source, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. In many ways, Anderson has made “precisely the movie that a child smitten” with Dahl’s fiction would have made.