The moving 3D adventure turns into one of Pixar’s strongest performers, the Saw series shows its first dip, and fans line up for small-hours premieres of This Is It

The winner
Pixar’s Up remains super-buoyant at the top of the box office, with yet another slim decline – 26% – and cumulative takings of £19.68m. After 17 days on release, the animation is well ahead of Pixar’s previous release WALL-E at the same stage of its run last summer (£13.56m) and modestly ahead of Ratatouille (£17.29m). However, Ratatouille’s 17-day figure included the whole October half-term holiday from 2007, whereas that has only just begun for Up. The film should have an especially rich period between now and Sunday.

Up has already overtaken the lifetime total of Pixar’s worst-performing UK title, Cars (£16.5m), and should soon shoot past Toy Story (£22.3m), WALL-E (£22.9m) and Ratatouille (£24.8m). But it still has a long way to go to challenge Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’ position as 2009′s biggest animation: that film, from rival studio Twentieth Century Fox, has been pushed back into cinemas for half-term and has now grossed £34.87m.

The rival animation
Offering an alternative to the computer-generated 3D sheen of Up is Wes Anderson’s determinedly lo-fi stop-motion animation Fantastic Mr Fox. Debut takings of £1.52m will be seen as not exactly stellar for a family film based on a recognised property (Roald Dahl’s 1970 story) – but taking all the factors into account, it’s an OK start. In the first place, Anderson has never been mega-box office, and has been on a declining revenue curve since his third movie, 2001′s The Royal Tenenbaums: that film, Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited opened with £700,000, £455,000 and £435,000, respectively. Secondly, takings for animations outside Disney/Pixar, DreamWorks and Fox’s Ice Age stables are hit and miss. Coraline debuted with £2.43m in May; Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs with £1.58m last month; and Tale of Despereaux with £561,000 last December. The first two titles on that list, unlike Fantastic Mr Fox, benefited from the higher ticket prices of 3D. Take your pick as to which is an appropriate comparison.

A hit franchise stumbles
“If it’s Halloween, it must be Saw” is the message Lionsgate has been successfully pumping out for five years. And in the UK, since peaking with a £2.52m opening for Saw III in 2006, debut grosses for the ingenious torture franchise have been impressively consistent: Saw IV began its life with £2.48m, and Saw V with £2.44m. Now, at last, Saw takes a stumble: the latest installment has opened with £1.74m. The result echoes a similar underperformance in the US, which had been attributed mostly to competition from low-budget horror phenomenon Paranormal Activity. That film doesn’t open until 27 November in the UK, so Saw VI’s dip here presumably reflects market saturation after pictures on five consecutive Octobers. Saw VII is set to be in 3D; if only Lionsgate had managed to present Saw VI in the popular format, it might have been a whole different story.

Arthouse goes AWOL
Last October, foreign-language releases Gomorrah and I’ve Loved You So Long both played to packed arthouses, while crossover title The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas appealed widely to upscale audiences. Fast forward to October 2009, and there’s a dearth of arthouse hits, unless you count The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus or smart comedy Zombieland, which we don’t. Top arthouse release is eco-documentary The Cove, which, despite lots of press and favorable reviews, opened at the weekened with a blah £18,000 from 27 screens, for a £665 average. The result goes to show how hard it is these days to get audiences to watch environment-themed documentaries in the cinema, even one that promises thrills and spills. The release this Friday of An Education can’t come soon enough for the nation’s independent cinemas.

The future
Michael Jackson’s This Is It is being unveiled to the world at the same time on Tuesday, which is fine if you live in LA (6pm) or New York (9pm), but not so great if you are in London (1am Wednesday morning), Paris (2am) and destinations east. Still, it’s all part of the hoopla Sony is building on the concert-rehearsal movie, and Michael Jackson fans should propel it to a stellar debut, especially since Wednesday and Thursday takings will be added in, giving a five-day opening “weekend” result. Advance ticket sales are said to be exceptionally high. After that, it’s more about how word of mouth can spread interest beyond the core fanbase.

UK top 10
1. Up, 549 sites, £3,807,003. Total: £19,683,204
2. Saw VI, 375 sites, £1,736,287 (New)
3. Fantastic Mr Fox, 481 sites, £1,517,312 (New)
4. Couples Retreat, 379 sites, £932,171. Total: £3,588,820
5. Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, 385 sites, £798,641 (New)
6. The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, 268 sites, £616,719. Total: £2,068,715
7. The Invention of Lying, 307 sites, £362,760. Total: £5,538,932
8. Zombieland, 279 sites, £323,815. Total: £3,001,207
9. Fame, 373 sites, £218,110. Total: £8,311,403
10. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 369 sites, £142,011. Total: £5,881,661

How the other openers did
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, 100 screens, £36,360
The Cove, 27 screens, £17,956
Johnny Mad Dog, 2 screens, £6,439 + £3,279 previews
Made in Jamaica, 2 screens, £2,345
Coffin Rock, 2 screens, £184
Colin, 3 screens, no figures available

The moving 3D adventure turns into one of Pixar’s strongest performers, the Saw series shows its first dip, and fans line up for small-hours premieres of This Is It

The winner
Pixar’s Up remains super-buoyant at the top of the box office, with yet another slim decline – 26% – and cumulative takings of £19.68m. After 17 days on release, the animation is well ahead of Pixar’s previous release WALL-E at the same stage of its run last summer (£13.56m) and modestly ahead of Ratatouille (£17.29m). However, Ratatouille’s 17-day figure included the whole October half-term holiday from 2007, whereas that has only just begun for Up. The film should have an especially rich period between now and Sunday.

Up has already overtaken the lifetime total of Pixar’s worst-performing UK title, Cars (£16.5m), and should soon shoot past Toy Story (£22.3m), WALL-E (£22.9m) and Ratatouille (£24.8m). But it still has a long way to go to challenge Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’ position as 2009′s biggest animation: that film, from rival studio Twentieth Century Fox, has been pushed back into cinemas for half-term and has now grossed £34.87m.

The rival animation
Offering an alternative to the computer-generated 3D sheen of Up is Wes Anderson’s determinedly lo-fi stop-motion animation Fantastic Mr Fox. Debut takings of £1.52m will be seen as not exactly stellar for a family film based on a recognised property (Roald Dahl’s 1970 story) – but taking all the factors into account, it’s an OK start. In the first place, Anderson has never been mega-box office, and has been on a declining revenue curve since his third movie, 2001′s The Royal Tenenbaums: that film, Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited opened with £700,000, £455,000 and £435,000, respectively. Secondly, takings for animations outside Disney/Pixar, DreamWorks and Fox’s Ice Age stables are hit and miss. Coraline debuted with £2.43m in May; Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs with £1.58m last month; and Tale of Despereaux with £561,000 last December. The first two titles on that list, unlike Fantastic Mr Fox, benefited from the higher ticket prices of 3D. Take your pick as to which is an appropriate comparison.

A hit franchise stumbles
“If it’s Halloween, it must be Saw” is the message Lionsgate has been successfully pumping out for five years. And in the UK, since peaking with a £2.52m opening for Saw III in 2006, debut grosses for the ingenious torture franchise have been impressively consistent: Saw IV began its life with £2.48m, and Saw V with £2.44m. Now, at last, Saw takes a stumble: the latest installment has opened with £1.74m. The result echoes a similar underperformance in the US, which had been attributed mostly to competition from low-budget horror phenomenon Paranormal Activity. That film doesn’t open until 27 November in the UK, so Saw VI’s dip here presumably reflects market saturation after pictures on five consecutive Octobers. Saw VII is set to be in 3D; if only Lionsgate had managed to present Saw VI in the popular format, it might have been a whole different story.

Arthouse goes AWOL
Last October, foreign-language releases Gomorrah and I’ve Loved You So Long both played to packed arthouses, while crossover title The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas appealed widely to upscale audiences. Fast forward to October 2009, and there’s a dearth of arthouse hits, unless you count The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus or smart comedy Zombieland, which we don’t. Top arthouse release is eco-documentary The Cove, which, despite lots of press and favorable reviews, opened at the weekened with a blah £18,000 from 27 screens, for a £665 average. The result goes to show how hard it is these days to get audiences to watch environment-themed documentaries in the cinema, even one that promises thrills and spills. The release this Friday of An Education can’t come soon enough for the nation’s independent cinemas.

The future
Michael Jackson’s This Is It is being unveiled to the world at the same time on Tuesday, which is fine if you live in LA (6pm) or New York (9pm), but not so great if you are in London (1am Wednesday morning), Paris (2am) and destinations east. Still, it’s all part of the hoopla Sony is building on the concert-rehearsal movie, and Michael Jackson fans should propel it to a stellar debut, especially since Wednesday and Thursday takings will be added in, giving a five-day opening “weekend” result. Advance ticket sales are said to be exceptionally high. After that, it’s more about how word of mouth can spread interest beyond the core fanbase.

UK top 10
1. Up, 549 sites, £3,807,003. Total: £19,683,204
2. Saw VI, 375 sites, £1,736,287 (New)
3. Fantastic Mr Fox, 481 sites, £1,517,312 (New)
4. Couples Retreat, 379 sites, £932,171. Total: £3,588,820
5. Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, 385 sites, £798,641 (New)
6. The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, 268 sites, £616,719. Total: £2,068,715
7. The Invention of Lying, 307 sites, £362,760. Total: £5,538,932
8. Zombieland, 279 sites, £323,815. Total: £3,001,207
9. Fame, 373 sites, £218,110. Total: £8,311,403
10. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 369 sites, £142,011. Total: £5,881,661

How the other openers did
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, 100 screens, £36,360
The Cove, 27 screens, £17,956
Johnny Mad Dog, 2 screens, £6,439 + £3,279 previews
Made in Jamaica, 2 screens, £2,345
Coffin Rock, 2 screens, £184
Colin, 3 screens, no figures available

George Clooney’s wily Mr Fox outwits the bad British farmers in Wes Anderson’s entertaining animated version of the Roald Dahl classic, says Philip French

The precision, brevity and clarity of Roald Dahl‘s literary style probably derived from the way you learn to give orders, keep logs, write situation reports and contribute to debriefings as an officer in the armed forces. His realism, lack of sentimentality, distrust of the adult world and streak of cruelty came from experiencing childhood, the class system and public schools from an alien perspective (a boy of Norwegian parents observing British institutions), followed by Second World War service as an RAF fighter pilot and subsequent intelligence work in Washington.

Apart from an awareness of his varied audiences, there isn’t a great deal of difference between Dahl’s writing for adult and juvenile readers, and one of the chief challenges in adapting his stories is opening them up. He was a perfect source for Alfred Hitchcock’s 25-minute TV mysteries. Indeed, one of his stories, “Man From the South”, was used twice by Hitchcock, and again by Quentin Tarantino for his macabre contribution to the 1995 portmanteau film Four Rooms.

But his first work to reach the big screen, “Beware of the Dog”, his classic wartime tale with a brilliant twist in the tail, was a four-page story expanded into the two-hour film 36 Hours. Equally, Fantastic Mr Fox, his 1970 children’s story, provides Wes Anderson and his co-screenwriter, Noah Baumbach, with the central characters and the narrative core for their highly diverting stop-motion animation film.

Dahl’s fable touches on issues of intensive agriculture and ethology, which were very much in the air at the time it appeared. The wily Mr Fox, who lives a natural life, loses his tail to the loathsome trio of exploitative agribusiness farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean. (The symbolic castration inevitably evokes the tail lost by Squirrel Nutkin to Old Brown the owl in the Beatrix Potter story.) The vicious trio then lay siege to Fox and his family, driving them further underground until Fox unites his threatened fellow creatures. Together, they penetrate the three farms from underground and live off the poultry, meat and vintage cider they steal while the dumb farmers sit waiting above.

In such films as The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson has shown a fascination with sibling rivalry, eccentric matriarchs and dysfunctional families uniting against the outside world and he introduces these themes into a more complicated, and sentimentalised version of Fox’s life. Like many a western gunfighter or gangster, the cool, suave Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is persuaded by his wife (Meryl Streep, Hollywood’s voice of balance and maturity) to give up a life of rapine for a more settled existence. So he becomes a journalist, moves from his underground lair to live in a tree sold to him by a local estate agent, inevitably a weasel (Wes Anderson himself).

Inevitably, bourgeois conformity goes against Fox’s nature and, like the super-crook Danny Ocean in the series of heist movies Clooney made with Steven Soderbergh, he recruits a dim possum for a few final raids on Boggis, Bunce and Bean, which result in the siege Dahl so admirably creates. Meanwhile, Fox’s adolescent son, Ash, has to compete with his visiting cousin, Kristofferson, a karate ace and all-round athlete who can dive from a tree into a barrel of water without causing a splash. The Anglo-American or mid-Atlantic setting is amusingly sustained by having the two cousins attend the local high school where they’re coached by Anderson regular Owen Wilson in “whackbat”, a bizarre cross between cricket and baseball.

When the film escalates into hectic action, it draws on Hollywood genres, westerns in the Sergio Leone mode and crime movies; the treacherous Rat (Willem Dafoe) has a redemptive death scene, a parody of a classic gangster film that happily produces laughter rather than tugging at heart strings.

In a tradition that has been going on since the 1950s, when the brutal Romans in Ben-Hur were played by British actors and the gentle Jews by Americans, the animals in Mr Fox are voiced by Americans and the oppressive humans by Englishmen. Bean, the most detestable farmer, is played by Michael Gambon using his menacing gangster accent from The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & Her Lover and Layer Cake.

But if the movie is Americanised, even to the extent of Mr Fox making his entry to the “Davy Crockett” theme from the 1950s Disney TV series, a significant contribution to the film’s beguilingly stylised graphic quality comes from British artists. The puppets are created by the team of MacKinnon and Saunders and the exceptional photography is the work of Tristan Oliver, who collaborated with Nick Park on most of Aardman’s stop-motion pictures, including Chicken Run, a film that compares favourably with Mr Fox.

In 1967, Roald Dahl scripted the fifth Bond movie, You Only Live Twice, which opens with a disturbing comic scene of an American space capsule being swallowed in orbit by Ernst Blofeld’s giant spacecraft that opens up at the front like a shark’s jaws. This is a black joke about the food chain and the survival of the fittest and his Mr Fox is part of this process. Anderson adds a coda to Fantastic Mr Fox that softens and domesticates Dahl’s ending. He removes Fox from his natural world red in tooth and claw and makes him an urban creature targeting supermarkets.

How could Wes Anderson have allowed his new animated film to be used to lure young children into bad eating habits?

Consider the great directors of cinema and what are the qualities that spring to mind? A distinctive personal imprint. Profundity and imagination expressed on every level. Stylistic innovation. But when you think back on the work of the so-called greats, don’t you feel, deep in your soul, that something intangible is missing? Well, now the wily young maverick Wes Anderson has revealed exactly what was absent from Tarkovsky, Bresson, Welles and the rest: a merchandising tie-in with McDonald’s. True art, it seems, can co-exist after all with moist, defeated cheeseburgers and limp, glossy French fries. I do hope Cahiers du Cinema got the memo.

Walk into a branch of the fast-food chain right now and you can pick up a Happy Meal in a carton emblazoned with images from Anderson’s latest film, Fantastic Mr Fox. Inside you will find a plastic figure, modelled on one of the film’s characters, which will be only slightly less pleasing to the tastebuds than the food it is helping to sell. As the company’s website so enticingly puts it: “Right now at McDonald’s we’re inviting your kids to join our exciting mission with Fantastic Mr Fox and his animal friends.”

None of which would be noteworthy in the slightest if the film in question were some DreamWorks piece of junk, or a knock-off directed by a hack. But even those of us who lost faith with Wes Anderson several films ago would agree that the director – and, one presumes, the studios with whom he works and the publicists who operate on his instructions – presents himself to the world as an auteur. His six features, from his 1996 debut Bottle Rocket through the near-perfect Rushmore and on to Fantastic Mr Fox, are characterised by an increasingly fanatical attention to detail comparable with Stanley Kubrick. If we are to believe the griping of the London crew who worked on the new picture while Anderson emailed directions from his Parisian base, he is the very embodiment of micromanagement. “I think he’s a little sociopathic,” the film’s cinematographer Tristan Oliver told the LA Times. “I think he’s a little OCD. Contact with people disturbs him … He’s a bit like the Wizard of Oz. Behind the curtain.”

So it would be highly unlikely that Anderson didn’t know about the McDonald’s deal; he may even have been required to sign off on it himself. Anderson should have followed the commendable example of Disney/Pixar, which stopped dealing with fast-food chains after the glaring contradiction of having McDonald’s plugging Cars, that homage to small-town values. The film harked back to a time when America wasn’t carved up by precisely those freeways which had enabled the ravenous expansion of corporations like McDonald’s. By the time of Ratatouille, which celebrated culinary sophistication and artistry, the relationship was untenable. “[Disney] realised their brand really stands for something,” Ratatouille’s director Brad Bird told me in 2007, “and it can only be in their best interest not to align themselves with unhealthy eating. So you won’t be finding Ratatouille merchandise at any fast-food outlets.”

Perhaps Anderson was so fixated on the process of making Fantastic Mr Fox that he forgot that films have a life beyond the screen. Any director is diminished by such an association, but someone like Anderson in particular should not be getting into bed with McDonald’s, and using his work to lure young children into destructive eating habits; it’s a lose-lose situation. He looks like a chump, the film becomes tainted, and obesity levels continue to rocket. Take into account the organic, pastoral quality of the film itself, and the value it places on environmental harmony, and the tie-in looks even more misjudged. If you’re going to use the blood-soaked fast-food industry to plug such a movie, why not go the whole hog and get Otis Ferry to provide one of the voices?

Wes Anderson’s first animation transposes the children’s classic into its own weird world, writes Peter Bradshaw

David Cameron’s Conservatives reckon on a prompt and triumphant restoration of England’s traditional fox-hunt when they get back in next year. I wonder. Maybe this eccentric, whip-smart and very funny new animation will help to make that legislation less appealing than they think.

It is Wes Anderson’s semi-Americanised version of Roald Dahl’s foxy tale for children from 1970, a book that very much sides with the uneatable against the unspeakable. Anderson uses the old-fashioned stop-motion technique, featuring models whose fur continually stirs and bristles in being repositioned for each frame, as if they are standing in front of the world’s weakest wind tunnel or a draughty English window. It’s like something by Oliver Postgate or Jan Svankmajer, and some might detect a trace of affectation in this olde-worlde effect, but I found it utterly beguiling and entirely consistent with Anderson’s quirky homespun aesthetic, his snappily offbeat dialogue and distinctive proscenium-style framing. In its cheerful anarchy and brutality it’s very Dahlian – in spirit, anyway.

Anderson’s movie takes the original story in wacky new directions; it sketches in an elaborate backstory for Mr and Mrs Fox, warmly and wittily voiced by George Clooney and Meryl Streep. Mr Fox has theoretically renounced his chicken-thieving ways on becoming a father – his boy is now a moody teen, Ash, voiced by Jason Schwartzman – and he has become a mild-mannered local newspaper columnist. But on moving into a new area, incidentally against the advice of his badger lawyer, voiced by Bill Murray, Mr Fox is piqued by three local farmers, agribusiness boors called Boggis, Bunce and Bean. He’s tempted into one last job against each of their smug citadels. This confrontation leads to the Freudian nightmare of Mr Fox getting his tail shot off.

In the traditional Hollywood manner, I’m afraid, the good guys are Americans, but the bad guys, the farmers, are Brits: led by hollow-faced meanie Bean, voiced by Michael Gambon. He totes a German Luger and bizarrely employs a kind of house musician, Petey, played by Jarvis Cocker, whose improvised ballad on the anti-fox offensive infuriates Bean: “That’s just bad songwriting, Petey!”

Granted, Anderson’s mannerisms have been irritating in the past, but pitching a film at children has restored his sweet-natured charm. This is hip – but with heart. Anderson and his co-writer, Noah Baumbach, together dream up a home-made simulacrum of the universe, in which lives a slightly reclusive and dysfunctional family group, like those in Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou or in Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale. Those were families who nursed their singularities and shared weirdnesses as a defence against the world. In Fantastic Mr Fox, the world itself seems just a little bit weird, but gloriously so. Ash’s bedroom has a tremendous toy train, which looks for all intents and purposes precisely like the real train we see periodically beetling across the landscape. This is a cosmos crying out to be played with and enjoyed. PB

From James Cameron to the Wachowski brothers to Steven Spielberg, US film-makers are paying homage to a groundbreaking Japanese anime – the movie that gave us today’s vision of cyberspace

When Larry and Andy Wachowski were pitching The Matrix to their producers, they played them a DVD of an 82-minute Japanese cartoon and said: “We wanna do that for real.” The film was 1995′s Ghost in the Shell, which defined a visual identity for cyberpunk cinema and counts James Cameron and Steven Spielberg among its most high-profile fans.

As it turned out, The Matrix wasn’t quite Ghost in the Shell “for real”, but it is indebted to it. Both films explore the virtual realm with a combination of existential questioning and kick-ass violence. The Wachowskis borrowed many of Ghost’s key details, including the digital “rain” of green numbers that signifies cyberspace, and the way humans plug themselves in through holes in the backs of their necks.

While he has just rereleased a “2.0″ refurbishment of his 15-year-old film, director Mamoru Oshii is modest about its pioneering qualities. “I did not revise it because I was dissatisfied with the original, but to prove how far we have progressed since then,” he explains. A cheerfully taciturn man with a penchant for basset hounds, Oshii doesn’t like to talk about the Matrix and any similarities to his film. “I’ve been asked this question hundreds of times. Frankly, it gets a bit annoying. I’m sure the Wachowski brothers feel the same. It is an entertaining movie, but I prefer their debut, Bound.”

Adapted from a comic book written by Masamune Shirow, Ghost in the Shell possesses many hallmarks of the anime (Japanese animation) genre: vast metropolises, lovingly detailed robots, military hardware, pneumatic women with huge eyes. The story is a future-noir thriller along the lines of Bladerunner, following a female cyborg detective on the trail of a mysterious hacker. She also questions her own identity: does she possess a “ghost” or a soul? Is she just a machine?

Surprisingly, the film was co-financed by a British company, Manga Films, an offshoot of Island records. Andy Frain, the movie’s executive producer, says: “I wanted to do a blend of east and west: western storytelling combined with Japanese artistry and a great soundtrack – we were talking to Massive Attack at one point.” But his suggestions were largely ignored, he says. The critics were lukewarm, and the film only reached a sizeable audience on video and DVD.

But it did appeal to an influential contingent of film-makers. James Cameron has described Ghost in the Shell as “a stunning work of speculative fiction . . . the first to reach a level of literary excellence”. (His forthcoming movie Avatar envisages a future in which humans can transfer their personalities into the bodies of an alien species. Sound familiar?)

Ghost in the Shell’s influence on Spielberg, another fan, is clear in AI: Artificial Intelligence, which ponders the philosophical implications of the human-automaton interface, and in the future-tech visions of Minority Report. In April this year, Spielberg’s Dreamworks studio acquired the remake rights to Ghost in the Shell; he plans to make a 3D live-action version.

In the past year, we’ve also had Joss Whedon’s enjoyable TV series Dollhouse, in which secret agents are wiped clean of their memories and personalities, so as to be implanted with new, temporary ones. And the sci-fi film Surrogates, out last month, imagines a future in which people prefer to stay at home and control avatars of themselves in the outside world.

But Ghost in the Shell went further than its Hollywood counterparts. Unlike the replicants in Blade Runner, the techno-slaves of The Matrix or the robot in AI, Ghost’s cyborg heroine does not seek to regain her “lost” humanity. Without giving away the ending, the film hints at the start of a brave new post-human era (or is it a Buddhist parable?) about the surrender of self into a larger entity. Quite a burden for an 82-minute cartoon.

Film-making by committee, however well-intentioned, is never a good idea

On the face of it, there’s no particular reason why the Tate gallery shouldn’t be getting involved in film-making: after all, its own commissions to fill the Turbine Hall have been a consistent success, and fine-art spaces the world over are finding themselves invaded by moving images as much as paintings, sculpture and installations. Not to mention artists themselves – Julian Schnabel, Douglas Gordon, Steve McQueen, et al – who are stepping forward to deliver movies on equal terms with “proper” film directors.

What is strange, though, is who Tate is getting into bed with. When it shows films, they tend to be firmly on the recondite end of the spectrum – like the art-porn Destricted collection or the Italian exploitation movies beloved of Tarantino fans. So no one would have been surprised if the Tate wanted to make some Larry Clark junkie saga, or a series of shorts about the pre-Raphaelites by Sam Taylor-Wood and Mark Wallinger. The fact that the Tate is joining up with the most family-friendly, whitest-bread film outfit in the country, Aardman Animations, is frankly, a bit of a shocker.

Details are a tad sketchy at the moment, but the Tate Movie Project appears to be one of those impeccably 21st century creations, designed to keep arts-funding bureaucrats, if no one else, on the edge of their seats. It’s connected at one end to the 2012 Olympics – for whose benefit the Legacy Trust is funding the project – and at the other to “every child in Britain” who, if Tate director Nicholas Serota is to believed, will be contributing directly to the film.

Quite how this will work is anyone’s guess – the last participatory movie I can think of, MySpace’s Faintheart – didn’t exactly generate faith in the communal approach. Will the workshops be much more than long-lead marketing devices? Will the final film simply be a sludge of kiddie cliches? Aardman, who will no doubt have a crack team on the case, will be wary of film-making by committee, however well-intentioned it is.

But whatever the outcome, Aardman is the beneficiary of a chunk of money from the public purse. Can it really make a feature-length animated film for £4m? Sounds like credit-crunch economics are really kicking in.

But lest we get too sceptical, it’s worth remembering that bureaucratic initiatives can sometimes come up with cinema gold – Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City came out of a scheme to make films for Liverpool’s European capital of culture year. Will the Tate Movie Project match up? First they have to change the title…

Tate teams up with Nick Park’s Aardman to give children chance to create characters, stories and drawings for animated film

For any small child who dreams of seeing stories and characters plucked from his or her imagination turned into a film, that fantasy could become reality.

Primary school children will have the opportunity to create their own animated characters on the same lines as Wallace & Gromit – and see them on cinema screens around the country.

Tate is teaming up with Aardman, the quadruple-Oscar-winning British animation company that created such characters as Wallace, Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, to create the first Tate movie.

Children across the UK will be encouraged to contribute original characters, stories, drawings and sound effects, and a team from Aardman will stitch the material into a feature-length animated film to be released in late 2011 or early 2012.

Tate will team up with museums and galleries nationwide, from the Orkneys to Newlyn in Cornwall, and from Omagh to Norwich. Children will be invited to attend workshops at which they will take the art displayed around them as a starting point for investigating drawing. According to Jane Burton, head of content at Tate Media, “children will look at how artists create mood and character through drawing and painting. The project will begin with art and artists.”

Aardman’s co-founder and chairman, David Sproxton, said: “We will then introduce children to key aspects of film-making, and, through performance and role play, developing characters.” The children will also be introduced to animation skills.

For those without access to workshops, information will be sent to every primary school in the UK so that teachers can replicate the sessions. A website will display galleries of drawings and put out calls for images (such as “we need trees”) or sounds.

A trial workshop in Bristol had encouraged children to “send us your burps”, said Sproxton. “That was very popular.” He added: “We will look at every child’s work – this is open to what children want to make of it.”

A storyline will be established with the help of children, and a professional scriptwriter will create a script “two-thirds complete, with holes in it to which children can contribute ideas,” said Sproxton.

Jane Burton, head of content for Tate Media, said the hope was to reach 1 million young people. The workshops are expected to begin next summer.

Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of Tate, said: “We’re giving children the opportunity to work at the coalface and really use their own creativity. This is about stimulating creativity among young people. It is a natural way of extending the education work that we do and capturing the interest of young people in the visual.”

The project is to be largely funded by the Legacy Trust, which has committed £3m to the project, which will cost £3.5m-£4m in total. The trust is an independent charity set up with government and lottery money to support cultural activities that celebrate the London 2012 Olympic games.

Dugald Mackie, its chair, said: “We are keen to enable children to participate in the London 2012 experience by taking part in new creative opportunities, and the Tate movie project will play a key role in building a sense of enthusiasm for and relevance of the 2012 games.”

The Tate movie is not an official Cultural Olympiad project, but Serota said he hoped it could become one. “One of the ambitions of the Cultural Olympiad is to reach out to children across the country – and we think we can do that.”

The projects announced as part of the olympiad shortly after London’s successful bid are under review following the appointment of Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House, as Cultural Olympiad chairman, replacing Jude Kelly, artistic director of the Southbank. Serota sits on a new olympiad board chaired by Hall.

Serota said: “This is a unique and ambitious project which will attempt to work creatively with a large number of children, building on what we already do in our education programmes with young children but also building on our partnerships with museums across the country. We will combine the extraordinary potential for children’s creativity with the best professionals in the field to create something really remarkable and unusual.”

Aardman’s early successes included the creation of Morph, the animated clay character that appeared on Tony Hart’s children’s art programmes on the BBC from the late 1970s. Later, Nick Park created the Wallace & Gromit characters, who sprang to fame in A Grand Day Out (1989). A Close Shave (1995) won two Oscars, and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) won an Oscar for best animated feature.

This charming and defiantly old-school animation of the Roald Dahl children’s classic gets the London film festival off to a cracking start

Wes Anderson gets his eccentric groove back on with a witty and likeable movie for little kids and their hip older siblings. It’s a demi-Americanised, wholly Andersonised version of the 1970 Roald Dahl children’s tale Fantastic Mr Fox, all about an elegant furry rapscallion pulling off the chicken-chomping crime of the century against three apoplectic farmers.

In a world where kids’ movies are generally presented in hi-tech 3D digital wonderment, Anderson defiantly presents his one in old-school stop-motion animation, making it look like something by Oliver Postgate or Jan Svankmajer. He even gets the fronds on his foxy heroes and heroines’ faces to stir and bristle in a style which for traditional animators was accidental – with the models being repositioned for each frame – but which for Anderson is a deliberate mannerism.

With co-writer Noah Baumbach, Anderson has created a movie with that oddball quality that I associate with both him and Michael Gondry: a quirky-homespun aesthetic with a meticulous foregrounding of knowing detail. He takes the story of the Fox clan and their battle against three agribusiness villains – Boggis, Bunce and Bean – and reimagines this feisty family as exactly the sort of amiably dysfunctional yet pin-smart bunch that he depicted in The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

Patriotic British filmgoers may, however, be disconcerted to note that with Mr Fox being voiced by George Clooney, Mrs Fox by Meryl Streep and their moody teen boy by Jason Schwartzman, the good guys are American. The baddies, led by a trigger-happy meanie voiced by Michael Gambon, are Brits. The local village appears to be from Olde Englande, with a pub and red post boxes, and the sound made by the local cider press is exactly like the textile lab in the Ealing classic The Man in the White Suit. Yet the Fox family attend an all-American high school over the hill, with a sports coach voiced by another Anderson repertory regular: Owen Wilson.

But even this cultural disconnect is all part of the general zaniness – which I confess I had found annoying in Anderson’s last film, The Darjeeling Limited, but which here is nicely judged. Something about pitching a film at children has put the charm and innocence back into Anderson’s comic style.

George Clooney’s smooth Mr Fox is in theory a mild-mannered newspaper columnist. But by night he is a daring robber and – without telling his wife – he plans to rob these three farmers of their livestock just as stylishly as Clooney’s Danny Ocean famously knocked over three Vegas casinos.

First, though, he needs help, starting with the dopey possum who fixes the sink in his new tree home. Then he employs the teenage cousin Kristofferson, who has come to stay in the family home and study at the local school – to his son’s chagrin, Kristofferson turns out to be a natural athlete and martial artist who furthermore winds up going steady with the class babe.

The farmers begin a military-style fightback against the vulpine invaders and Mr Fox and his crew have to dig for victory – and survival.

The key themes of Wes Anderson and his co-writer Noah Baumbach have generally been impossible, absurd families, each with a paterfamilias who’s stranger than fiction – and that’s how they have reimagined Mr Fox. It’s a smart and well-written kink in the furry Dahl tale.

• Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian’s film critic

• This article was amended on 16 October 2009. The original referred to the foxes as lupine invaders. This has been corrected.

Xan Brooks tracks the stars at the world premiere of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox on the opening night of the 53rd London film festival