MOVIE REVIEW: 'Mr. Fox' is for the kids and the kid in you

Cheeky, original, funny, satisfyingly silly and even a bit profound, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” like “Where the Wild Things Are,” is a quirky delight for children and the child hopefully still residing in every adult.

In director Wes Anderson’s quirky, stop-motion-animated take on Roald Dahl’s children’s classic, we meet the Fox family: Mr. Fox (voice of George Clooney), Mrs. Fox (voice of Meryl Streep), and their insecure son, Ash (voice of Jason Schwartzman), all of whom have, for 12 years, lived a peaceable life in a perfectly satisfactory hole in the ground.

It’s the peaceable part that is driving Mr. Fox bonkers, though you’d never know it from his good-natured, urbane exterior. When he and the Mrs. met, he was the best chicken thief around, a lifestyle Mrs. Fox forced him to leave behind.

Mr. Fox, now an unfulfilled newspaper editorialist, can no longer repress his animal instincts. First, he moves his family out of their subterranean home into a tree house, (over his wife’s protestations) and then sets his sights on three farms. Telling his family he is off for one assignment or another, the wily Mr. Fox uses all his cunning to begin raiding the farms of Boggis, Bunce and Bean.

The men tear down the tree, driving the foxes underground. Undeterred, the farmers begin blasting to get to their crafty prey. What seemed like a fun diversion becomes a danger to the entire animal community.

“The Fantastic Mr. Fox” is pure psychedelic deliciousness. It is astonishing how many of director Anderson’s (“Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums,” “The Darjeeling Limited”) usual visual flourishes, production design decisions and chief visuals survive the journey from live action to the marvelously retro animation.

“The Fantastic Mr. Fox” is wonderfully retro, incorporating a snarky 1960s and ’70s aesthetic and buttressed by the predictably brilliant soundtrack. Anderson captures the jaunty tone perfectly and translates it into a world inhabited by talking animals who dress in suits and read newspapers as if they were human.

Though Mr. Fox is often a stubborn fool who ignores the common-sense advice of everyone around him when it contradicts his own rapacious desires (more often than not to the detriment of all those around him), he is right in at least one respect — he is, in his heart, a wild animal and he likes it that way. The tame, domesticated life is suffocating who he was born to be.

Through this simple metaphor, Anderson seems to be saying something about you and me as well.

"FANTASTIC MR. FOX"

Cast: The voices of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Michael Gambon
Director: Wes Anderson
Theaters: Chapel Hills, Cinemark, Hollywood, Kimball’s, Tinseltown
Rated: PG (for action, smoking and slang humor)
Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes