By Sukhdev Sandhu. Published: 5:21PM BST 22 Oct 2009  Wes Anderson; George Clooney; Bill Murray; Rating: * * * *  It doesn’t seem so long ago that Wes Anderson was widely touted as one of the brightest and most distinctive of a generation of new American film makers that also included Spike Jonze, Alexander Payne and David O. Russell. The sob-streaked humour and super-stylised visuals of movies such as Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums were seen as catnip for a younger generation of cinephiles.  However, his most recent works, The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, showed worrying signs of fatigue: charm had given way to arch whimsy; the inventiveness of old had curdled into mannerism and melancholia.  Only the most optimistic of souls or the most hardcore Anderson fanboy could have held out much hope when it was announced he was planning to put Roald Dahl’s 1970 novel Fantastic Mr Fox on the screen. An American (even one renowned for his Anglophile tendencies) getting his manicured nails on such a beloved English book (even though Dahl was born in Wales to Norwegian parents)? The idea was perplexing.  So, even bearing in mind the stop-motion sequences in The Life Aquatic, was the news that the film was going to be a full-length animation. Then there were stories coming from the set that the animators were unhappy with Anderson communicating with them by email. The film had all the makings of a train wreck.  It’s a huge surprise, then, but a very pleasing one, to be able to announce that Anderson’s adaptation is not just a return to form, but a bold and for the most part highly successful leap into relatively uncharted waters. He’s retained enough core elements of the original story not to disappoint Dahl-lovers, but fused and intermixed them with his trademark attention to colour, fashion and moodscapes in a manner that in no ways feels like a compromise, but rather a happy and seamless marriage of artistic outlooks.  When, at the end of the film, its hero leaps up victoriously from his subterranean incarceration, rescuing victory from the jaws of defeat, it could almost be Anderson himself rescuing, at least for now, what seemed like his rapidly tanking career.  Mr Fox, a suave and elegantly decked-out creature (voiced, in a cute piece of casting, by George Clooney), used to be a chicken-stealing rapscallion, a furry pirate of private farmland. He used to pride himself on his ability to outwit the estate-owners whose holdings he trespassed and wrecked.  After a decade of best-behaviour and leading a quiet family life with his wife (Meryl Streep), their son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) and his seemingly-permanent house-guest nephew Kristofferson (Eric Anderson), he finds himself drawn to his old poultry-thieving ways. As a result, he has three malicious farmers — Boggis, Bunce and the formidable Bean (the latter voiced by Michael Gambon) — dead-set on smoking him out of his lair and wiping him out.  The film, which I fully expect Taliban film critics to interpret as a veiled critique of Western efforts to track down and exterminate enemy insurgents, works as a series of siege narratives with Anderson, his screenwriting partner Noah (The Squid and the Whale) Baumbach, and a team of art modellers coming up with a series of exquisitely realised tunnels, burrows and catacombs through which the foxes retreat and circulate as they try to escape all the machines and explosives the 3Bs can throw at them.  One gorgeous shot, set in the waterfall of a flint mine, in which slivers of dappled and multiply refracted light fall on Mr Fox’s face, deserves to be printed and displayed at the National Portrait Gallery.  The film is full of beauty, bathing the action in attractive oranges, browns and yellows that recall the colour scheme in The Darjeeling Limited but minus its finicky, fastidious, look-at-me tiresomeness. And the clothes - cord jackets, knitwear, balaclavas for robbing warehouses in — all of them worn by gamine, borderline heroin-chic figures, deserve to have a fashion range constructed around them. Mr Fox is so dashing that he’s liable to start a craze for strap-on tails.  The stop-motion animation is similarly retro-tinged. Not for Anderson the clean, anything-goes digital sheen of Pixar; instead, he has opted for a more handmade, almost wheezy look that is steeped in the early 1970s, evoking the plaintive work of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, the quiet geniuses responsible for Bagpuss and The Clangers, and, in a delightful scene in which the foxes devour food with frenzied, squawking energy, the cat in the 'Charley Says’ public information films.  It wouldn’t be an Anderson film — or a Baumbach film for that matter — if it didn’t seethe with dysfunction and malaise. Many of the characters seem to be afflicted by mild forms of Aspergers’ Syndrome or depression. A typical exchange involves the neurotic Ash asking, “Do you think I’m an athlete?” “What’s the subtext here?” his father replies. Later, Mr Fox can be heard musing: “Who am I? I’m saying this more like existentialism.”  Such therapist lingo will pass over the heads of younger viewers, who will rejoice instead in the briskly-handled action scenes. People of all ages, however, will likely warm to Willem Dafoe’s ghetto-talking, finger-snapping, striped-jumpered rodent who elicits the film’s best line when Mrs Fox rebuffs his advances with a tart: “Am I being flirted with by a psychotic rat?”  Looked at in belligerent terms, it’s possible to regard as Fantastic Mr Fox as little more than an entertaining soufflé replete with a roll-call of Anderson’s go-to regulars (Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray), musical in-jokes (Jarvis Cocker shows up as a bluegrass singer), and over-used verbal gags (when characters swear they say the word “cuss”).  This is an adaptation of a book by Dahl though, not Kafka (hmm - an Anderson reworking of The Trial might be something). Only an idiot would expect profound insights. What we do get, though, is a dazzlingly imaginative and poetically inflected comic caper that offers the tantalizing possibility that Anderson’s best work, far from being a distant memory, is still to come.
Wes Anderson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox is a successful    leap into uncharted waters.