Fantastic Mr. Fox

All at once Fantastic Mr. Fox washes over the viewer like an instant classic of its kind. Both as animated adult fare and as a quirky Wes Anderson film FMF leaves audiences satisfied and beaming.
Using a stop motion style that harkens to pre-computer assisted filmmaking (although there are no doubt some nice invisible digital touch ups) Anderson creates a unique world populated mainly by foxes and moles, a few bunnies, with a couple of bad humans and one nasty rat. The look of the film is decidedly low tech but high concept. There are more orange sunset hues in this film than any movie since Coppola's 1983 The Outsiders.
Based on a book by Roald Dahl, FMF feels concern for the nature of the animals relationship and gazes deep into marital relations as well as parent child rearing. There are typical Anderson father-son conflicts. The lead protagonists makes a living as a chicken thief but when his wife balks he gets in journalism, specifically penning a newspaper column which Mr. Fox thinks nobody reads.
Anderson was originally paired with Henry Selick who himself left FMF to make the year's other animated wonder Coraline. Vocal stylings were recorded in a forest or other inspirational locales rather than a studio per press notes. An exceptional cast includes George Clooney and Meryl Streep as the titular fox and his wife, but smaller turns from an array of talent (Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Anderson's bother Eric, Michael Gambon, Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson) also delight at every hopscotch step.
Fantastic Mr. Fox is the kind of film that keeps the viewer enthralled without a moment's respite. FMF veers more into grown-up territory due to the way he handles mortality. There's a scene midway through where Fox ends the life of a Rat. We see red thread as blood on the rat's neck and Fox and Rat have a last conversation. The moment reminded me of the death scene between Brando and Nicholson in Missouri Breaks. Send the little sprites to see Planet 51 or some Disney confection and savor Fantastic Mr. Fox for its wealth of sophisticated entertainment.