Last night I checked out Wes Anderson’s latest film effort and first completely stop-motion animated feature length, Fantastic Mr. Fox. Based on Roald Dahl’s children’s story from 1970, Anderson pays homage to the original story while enriching it with his likable, fascinating, and flawed characters.

From the very first scene you realize how complimentary stop-motion animation is to Wes Anderson’s vision. He works so hard at creating these warm environments filled with perfectly coordinated style and nostalgia that the difference between the full size sets used in all of his past movies and the fantasy world miniatures created for this movie really didn’t seem all that different. His characters seemed to work on a very similar level as well which made me wonder just how great it might be to see something like The Life Aquatic or Rushmore animated in stop-motion.

I really, really enjoyed this flick. I grew up reading or being read many of Roald Dahl’s books because they always seemed to be a little more sarcastic and edgy than many of the other contemporary children’s authors of the time all without losing site of a moral at the end. Looking back on it now it seems as though Wes Anderson is the perfect man to deal with a children’s story addressing loneliness, isolation and self discovery. I really hope the success of Fantastic Mr. Fox leads to Wes Anderson working more with stop-motion animation and bringing along his familiar entourage of A Listers to voice the parts. On that note, Willem Dafoe takes the cake with his switch blade wielding rat character that had me thinking about handsome Bobby Peru.

This a great holiday movie for the fam, go check it out. The seven year old kid leaving the theatre in front of me even agreed as he announced to his family: “It wasn’t funny…but I still liked it.” (it actually was funny, he was just being pretentious and controversial).