Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

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Back when Fantastic Mr. Fox debuted a few months ago, the following thought occurred to me: "Wes Anderson is forever doomed to make Wes Anderson movies." Here's a director who did all he could to step outside his comfort zone, adapting someone else's work for the first time—in this case, that of Roald Dahl, an author with his own singularity—and using stop-motion animation, a painstaking collaborative process that seems like it should suppress his auteurist instincts. Alas, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a Wes Anderson movie from frame one, because he found a way to square his sensibility with Dahl;s (or, as detractors might put it, "shoehorn it in") and wrangle a team of animators into bringing his homemade, obsessively detailed Rankin-Bass universe to life.

— Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club.

Most of Wes Anderson's previous films have taken simple stories, draped them with stifling pathos, then decorated with low-key, quirky absurdity. I have always disliked the one and adored the other, so Fox, which can only drizzle its vinagrette of seriousness over an action-comedy caper, written for children as much as adults, has immediately become my favourite.

It's fantastic.

- Sam - 2010-01-08 23:16:15