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.

The Royal Tenenbaums director’s Roald Dahl adaptation – starring George Clooney and Meryl Streep – is full of his trademark wry dialogue, whimsical characters and quirky visual cues.

The last time I saw Wes Anderson, seven years ago, he was wearing a tight, beige corduroy suit. He’s still wearing it today. On the previous occasion, though – a Q&A for his film The Royal Tenenbaums – it was accessorised with plastic-framed glasses and a preppy scarf. Now the glasses have gone, there’s a stripey tie, and the hair is longer and more luxuriant. He looks less geeky, as if he’s been spending more time outdoors. Does he go hiking in his corduroy suit, perhaps? “I rely on corduroy,” Anderson admits. “I’ve been here in London a week – this is all I’ve got.” It’s not the same suit, though, he stresses. “They last a couple of years. I have a guy who makes them specially for me. They’re very inexpensive and I can just call him up and say, ‘Can I have another one please?’”

Every director needs a trademark. Anderson is a giant compendium of trademarks. His movies have varied in scope and setting, but they’re all of a type. Whether it’s a broken family of overachievers (The Royal Tenenbaums), a morose ocean explorer (The Life Aquatic) or an Indian train odyssey (The Darjeeling Limited), you’ll find the same blend of urbane comedy, regular players (Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston, Jason Schwartzman), and obsessive attention to design details such as lettering (Futura, always), decor (that painstakingly hand-painted train in The Darjeeling Limited, for example), soundtrack (retro but not too obscure), or costume (vintage Adidas, Lacoste, and, of course, corduroy).

His latest, Fantastic Mr Fox, features most of the above, and it should come as no surprise to see that its hero sports a natty double-breasted version of Anderson’s beloved suit, tastefully accessorised with a few ears of wheat in the breast pocket. More surprising is the fact that Anderson has made a children’s movie. It’s based on Roald Dahl’s novel, of course – the simple tale of a cocky fox pursued by three determined farmers.

People watch Wes Anderson’s movies precisely because they’re not about the real world

Anderson himself seems pretty surprised he’s made the film. He’s wanted to do it for a good 10 years, he says, since it was the first book he remembers ever owning. “I grew up loving it and somewhere along the way I thought this one should be mine.” But he imagined it as a side project he could oversee while making another movie. “I thought I’d do the script and record the actors and design it, then other people would just … animate it. And they’d send it to me and I’d say ‘good’ and maybe tinker with it a bit. But that’s not the way it ended up happening at all. “

Henry Selick, who animated the imaginary sea creatures in The Life Aquatic (and had previously adapted Dahl’s James And The Giant Peach), was lined up to do Fantastic Mr Fox, but then he went off to make Coraline instead. “And I got more interested in the details of it,” Anderson continues. “So in fact, for the last two years, my whole life has been Fantastic Mr Fox every day. But I’m happy about that because this is the only way I could feel like this is really one of my movies.”

There’s no mistaking Anderson’s touch. With the help of that compendium of trademarks (including new additions George Clooney and Meryl Streep as Mr and Mrs Fox), and some gloriously old-school stop-motion animation, Anderson fleshes out Dahl’s basic story into something more like The Royal Tenenbaums mixed with Ocean’s 11 and Bagpuss.

For a detail addict like Anderson, animation must be the movie equivalent of crack cocaine. Here’s a world where everything needs designing from scratch, and every frame is a carefully composed still photograph – 61,920 of them in the whole movie. It was all made in Britain, and many of the film’s details – the furniture, the interiors, the buildings – came from Gipsy House, Dahl’s Buckinghamshire home. Anderson had been in touch with Dahl’s estate since 2000, when he first thought about making the movie, and Dahl’s widow, Felicity, let Anderson and his co-writer Noah Baumbach stay at Gipsy House to write the movie. They basically photographed everything in it while they were there and had it all copied in miniature for the movie sets. So there’s a distinctly British feel to it, despite the fact the animals all have American accents and the dastardly humans are English – a move that’s sure to set whiskers twitching in the home counties. Is there a buried political subtext to the movie? Not really. As Anderson points out, real animals in England don’t have British accents either since they can’t actually speak.

Anderson doesn’t really do politics. He doesn’t really do “real”, his critics say. His previous movie, The Darjeeling Limited, at least made an attempt to engage with the outside world. Granted, its trio of materialistic Americans rarely left their luxurious train, but when they did, they were confronted with a harder reality that threatened to shatter the film’s precious little world, such as when a child tragically drowns. It was pleasing to see the film-maker stretching himself, even if it laid him open to accusations of cultural imperialism. As the reviewer in Slate.com put it, “Beware of any film in which an entire race and culture is turned into therapeutic scenery.”

“More was written about the fact that these guys were walking around India with Vuitton bags than practically anything else in the whole film,” Anderson complains. “I don’t think I’ve made a film where I’ve had a political agenda that I was trying to get across or anything like that. I want to create a certain sort of world that doesn’t quite exist, to imagine something new. With Darjeeling, our goal was to make as personal a story as we could, and it’s filled with things that are connected with our lives and experiences and people close to us.”

Anderson’s stories are full of adults who act like children and children who act like adults – at the moment he’s somewhere between the two

People watch Anderson’s movies precisely because they’re not about the real, grown-up world. That heightened, self-referential, beautifully-designed reality that’s so alluring in his films is only really possible in hermetic environments: schools, homes, ships, trains, underground. “I guess that’s what happens if you’re going to try to invent something with the way the movie is designed and where it’s set. Often it means you can’t stray too far off the set because it’s not like that any more over there,” he laughs, pointing across the room.

That’s almost an admission that style triumphs over substance, but then Anderson’s style has shaped American indie cinema for much of the past decade. His trademarks have been ripped off to the point of becoming cliches. A few years ago, The Onion even ran a piece entitled “10 Movies That Couldn’t Have Happened Without Wes Anderson”, detecting his influence in indie hits like Napoleon Dynamite, Juno and Little Miss Sunshine – most of which were bigger draws than Anderson’s own films.

He’s awkward about acknowledging his influence. “I’ve never had … I don’t think that … um,” he stammers, trying to work out a way of not sounding too big-headed. “It’s certainly a nice idea to think that … one could have …” He goes on to list innumerable film-makers he has been influenced by himself, from Bergman to Soderbergh to Almodóvar to Spike Lee. “Stanley Kubrick is the one I think about now,” he says. Kubrick’s favourite font was also Futura.

Anderson’s stories are full of adults who act like children and children who act like adults, and at the moment he seems to be somewhere between the two. He’s no longer the hipster prodigy he was in the days of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. He’s shed the geek chic and is 40 years old now. It would be interesting to see him take on heavier, more “mature”, Kubrick-like themes, but instead he seems to have come running back to the security of the playpen with Fantastic Mr Fox.

Perhaps that is a form of growing up. Having led the hipster generation into reluctant adulthood, he’s now making movies they can take their children to. Despite his insistence that Mr Fox is based on Dahl himself, it’s tempting to also read him as the director’s corduroy-veiled alter ego. Mr Fox is a flamboyant charmer, an impulsive dreamer who doesn’t accept his position in life, a risk-taker who’s got some growing up to do. Like Anderson he’s also approaching middle age, thinking about moving up the real estate ladder and settling down. Anderson has spent the past few years flitting between Paris and New York, but has recently bought a house in Kent, he says. He intends to live part of the year there with his British-raised girlfriend. So is that why he’s making a children’s movie? To show to his own kids one day? “It’d be nice to have a six-year-old and say, ‘I have this film I made, you might quite like it’. Yeah, definitely that’s on my mind.” You can just picture him writing in his wood-panelled study like Mr Fox, looking out at the children playing in his English country garden, in identical little corduroy suits

Fantastic Mr Fox is out now

The Royal Tenenbaums director’s Roald Dahl adaptation – starring George Clooney and Meryl Streep – is full of his trademark wry dialogue, whimsical characters and quirky visual cues.

The last time I saw Wes Anderson, seven years ago, he was wearing a tight, beige corduroy suit. He’s still wearing it today. On the previous occasion, though – a Q&A for his film The Royal Tenenbaums – it was accessorised with plastic-framed glasses and a preppy scarf. Now the glasses have gone, there’s a stripey tie, and the hair is longer and more luxuriant. He looks less geeky, as if he’s been spending more time outdoors. Does he go hiking in his corduroy suit, perhaps? “I rely on corduroy,” Anderson admits. “I’ve been here in London a week – this is all I’ve got.” It’s not the same suit, though, he stresses. “They last a couple of years. I have a guy who makes them specially for me. They’re very inexpensive and I can just call him up and say, ‘Can I have another one please?’”

Every director needs a trademark. Anderson is a giant compendium of trademarks. His movies have varied in scope and setting, but they’re all of a type. Whether it’s a broken family of overachievers (The Royal Tenenbaums), a morose ocean explorer (The Life Aquatic) or an Indian train odyssey (The Darjeeling Limited), you’ll find the same blend of urbane comedy, regular players (Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston, Jason Schwartzman), and obsessive attention to design details such as lettering (Futura, always), decor (that painstakingly hand-painted train in The Darjeeling Limited, for example), soundtrack (retro but not too obscure), or costume (vintage Adidas, Lacoste, and, of course, corduroy).

His latest, Fantastic Mr Fox, features most of the above, and it should come as no surprise to see that its hero sports a natty double-breasted version of Anderson’s beloved suit, tastefully accessorised with a few ears of wheat in the breast pocket. More surprising is the fact that Anderson has made a children’s movie. It’s based on Roald Dahl’s novel, of course – the simple tale of a cocky fox pursued by three determined farmers.

People watch Wes Anderson’s movies precisely because they’re not about the real world

Anderson himself seems pretty surprised he’s made the film. He’s wanted to do it for a good 10 years, he says, since it was the first book he remembers ever owning. “I grew up loving it and somewhere along the way I thought this one should be mine.” But he imagined it as a side project he could oversee while making another movie. “I thought I’d do the script and record the actors and design it, then other people would just … animate it. And they’d send it to me and I’d say ‘good’ and maybe tinker with it a bit. But that’s not the way it ended up happening at all. “

Henry Selick, who animated the imaginary sea creatures in The Life Aquatic (and had previously adapted Dahl’s James And The Giant Peach), was lined up to do Fantastic Mr Fox, but then he went off to make Coraline instead. “And I got more interested in the details of it,” Anderson continues. “So in fact, for the last two years, my whole life has been Fantastic Mr Fox every day. But I’m happy about that because this is the only way I could feel like this is really one of my movies.”

There’s no mistaking Anderson’s touch. With the help of that compendium of trademarks (including new additions George Clooney and Meryl Streep as Mr and Mrs Fox), and some gloriously old-school stop-motion animation, Anderson fleshes out Dahl’s basic story into something more like The Royal Tenenbaums mixed with Ocean’s 11 and Bagpuss.

For a detail addict like Anderson, animation must be the movie equivalent of crack cocaine. Here’s a world where everything needs designing from scratch, and every frame is a carefully composed still photograph – 61,920 of them in the whole movie. It was all made in Britain, and many of the film’s details – the furniture, the interiors, the buildings – came from Gipsy House, Dahl’s Buckinghamshire home. Anderson had been in touch with Dahl’s estate since 2000, when he first thought about making the movie, and Dahl’s widow, Felicity, let Anderson and his co-writer Noah Baumbach stay at Gipsy House to write the movie. They basically photographed everything in it while they were there and had it all copied in miniature for the movie sets. So there’s a distinctly British feel to it, despite the fact the animals all have American accents and the dastardly humans are English – a move that’s sure to set whiskers twitching in the home counties. Is there a buried political subtext to the movie? Not really. As Anderson points out, real animals in England don’t have British accents either since they can’t actually speak.

Anderson doesn’t really do politics. He doesn’t really do “real”, his critics say. His previous movie, The Darjeeling Limited, at least made an attempt to engage with the outside world. Granted, its trio of materialistic Americans rarely left their luxurious train, but when they did, they were confronted with a harder reality that threatened to shatter the film’s precious little world, such as when a child tragically drowns. It was pleasing to see the film-maker stretching himself, even if it laid him open to accusations of cultural imperialism. As the reviewer in Slate.com put it, “Beware of any film in which an entire race and culture is turned into therapeutic scenery.”

“More was written about the fact that these guys were walking around India with Vuitton bags than practically anything else in the whole film,” Anderson complains. “I don’t think I’ve made a film where I’ve had a political agenda that I was trying to get across or anything like that. I want to create a certain sort of world that doesn’t quite exist, to imagine something new. With Darjeeling, our goal was to make as personal a story as we could, and it’s filled with things that are connected with our lives and experiences and people close to us.”

Anderson’s stories are full of adults who act like children and children who act like adults – at the moment he’s somewhere between the two

People watch Anderson’s movies precisely because they’re not about the real, grown-up world. That heightened, self-referential, beautifully-designed reality that’s so alluring in his films is only really possible in hermetic environments: schools, homes, ships, trains, underground. “I guess that’s what happens if you’re going to try to invent something with the way the movie is designed and where it’s set. Often it means you can’t stray too far off the set because it’s not like that any more over there,” he laughs, pointing across the room.

That’s almost an admission that style triumphs over substance, but then Anderson’s style has shaped American indie cinema for much of the past decade. His trademarks have been ripped off to the point of becoming cliches. A few years ago, The Onion even ran a piece entitled “10 Movies That Couldn’t Have Happened Without Wes Anderson”, detecting his influence in indie hits like Napoleon Dynamite, Juno and Little Miss Sunshine – most of which were bigger draws than Anderson’s own films.

He’s awkward about acknowledging his influence. “I’ve never had … I don’t think that … um,” he stammers, trying to work out a way of not sounding too big-headed. “It’s certainly a nice idea to think that … one could have …” He goes on to list innumerable film-makers he has been influenced by himself, from Bergman to Soderbergh to Almodóvar to Spike Lee. “Stanley Kubrick is the one I think about now,” he says. Kubrick’s favourite font was also Futura.

Anderson’s stories are full of adults who act like children and children who act like adults, and at the moment he seems to be somewhere between the two. He’s no longer the hipster prodigy he was in the days of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. He’s shed the geek chic and is 40 years old now. It would be interesting to see him take on heavier, more “mature”, Kubrick-like themes, but instead he seems to have come running back to the security of the playpen with Fantastic Mr Fox.

Perhaps that is a form of growing up. Having led the hipster generation into reluctant adulthood, he’s now making movies they can take their children to. Despite his insistence that Mr Fox is based on Dahl himself, it’s tempting to also read him as the director’s corduroy-veiled alter ego. Mr Fox is a flamboyant charmer, an impulsive dreamer who doesn’t accept his position in life, a risk-taker who’s got some growing up to do. Like Anderson he’s also approaching middle age, thinking about moving up the real estate ladder and settling down. Anderson has spent the past few years flitting between Paris and New York, but has recently bought a house in Kent, he says. He intends to live part of the year there with his British-raised girlfriend. So is that why he’s making a children’s movie? To show to his own kids one day? “It’d be nice to have a six-year-old and say, ‘I have this film I made, you might quite like it’. Yeah, definitely that’s on my mind.” You can just picture him writing in his wood-panelled study like Mr Fox, looking out at the children playing in his English country garden, in identical little corduroy suits

Fantastic Mr Fox is out now

The screen adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 morality tale has sparked a debate about the merits of frightening our children

When Jess Hyde picked a copy of Where the Wild Things Are from the bedroom shelf last week, her seven-year-old son, Arthur, pointed to it and said: “That gives me nightmares.”

“He had never mentioned it before,” says the mother of three from Frome, Somerset. “But it is a tricky one because the monsters are quite scary. They are not friendly pictures. It is something about the colour – they are brown and grey and not very endearing.” Arthur’s mother, who was given the book by friends, asked her son if he wanted her to read it. “He still said yes,” she laughs.

The spooky palm tree fronds and twisting vines that invade the bedroom of naughty Max in this nursery classic will soon be invading the imaginations of young children anew, as a film version of Maurice Sendak’s book heads for the cinema. A modern morality tale, Sendak’s story sees little Max reject his parental home for a world where he can become “king of all wild things”. It has been brought to the screen this autumn by director Spike Jonze and writer Dave Eggers, who adapted the screenplay. Their film has won plaudits from many critics, but some parents have been troubled by the ferocity of the story, and by the power of Jonze’s new interpretation. As a result, they are advising other families to stay away.

The protest, or “wild rumpus” to borrow a phrase from the book, that has greeted the release of the film echoes disquiet about the bleak message embedded in Disney/Pixar’s latest animated release. Entitled Up, it has been viewed by many parents as anything but.

A handful of American educationalists, including Professor Holly Willett, of Rowan University in New Jersey, have rushed to defend Sendak’s 1963 book, but the new film stands accused of presenting unsettling images that, although popular, are likely to breed nightmares. A public debate about whether or not a child’s appetite for being frightened should be indulged is now in full swing.

“This is a classic hero’s story in which the protagonist undertakes a journey and returns a wiser person,” Willett, an expert on children’s literature, has argued in the American press. And Sendak’s original tale has certainly stood the test of time: it is a reliable classic on the shelves of middle-class toddlers on both sides of the Atlantic and in 1983 composer Oliver Knussen turned it into a one-act opera that has joined the modern repertoire.

“I remember reading the Sendak book to my children and it frightened the pyjamas off them,” Roger McGough, the poet, said this weekend. “But they went back to it. It is a scariness that you can control and that ends happily.”

McGough has had similar problems with his own children’s poem, The Lesson, in which a teacher inflicts cartoon-style violence on his pupils. “I was a teacher myself when I wrote it and it was a joke, but some parents now consider it inappropriate and I can see that contexts change,” said McGough. But he points out that children’s stories, from Snow White onwards, have always contained danger and death. “It is just part of the landscape. Although I don’t think a writer should set out to scare children.”

The traditional fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm are packed with disturbing twists, while the appeal of Roald Dahl’s work is inseparable from the dark side of his imagination. Dahl’s story The Fantastic Mr Fox is the subject of another film adaptation by a cult American director this autumn. Wes Anderson’s film opened the London Film Festival on Wednesday and is full of nature “red in tooth and claw”. Like Dahl’s book, it tells of a family of foxes besieged by evil farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean, who are armed with guns, industrial diggers and explosives. Anderson has defended the “adult content” in his film by saying that children in his audience should be able to ask their parents about their worries as part of their learning process.

Willett argues that a good storyteller “knows that kids have many difficult feelings, as well as feelings that adults have forgotten about”, and so does not shy away from dark material.

Jonze and Eggers have fought hard for five years to retain the more troubling content in Where the Wild Things Are. Eggers received repeated notes from concerned producers about the screenplay. “There is a whitewashed, idealised version of childhood that is popular in movies. It has the kids sitting neatly in their chairs, talking with some adult, in a sarcastic, overly sophisticated but polite way – a concoction that bears no resemblance to an actual kid,” he explains.

In defence of the new film, Michael Phillips, critic for the Chicago Tribune, has argued that it is grown-ups who are more disturbed by its darkness.

“I suspect kids will go for it more than their parents; in my experience, it’s parents who tend to get fussed up about material they perceive, often wrongly, as ‘too dark’ or difficult. There’s a certain amount of pain in Where the Wild Things Are, but it’s completely earned. The movie fills you with all sorts of feelings, and I suspect children will recognise those feelings as their own,” he writes. In an article in this month’s edition of the journal The Psychologist, psychoanalyst Richard Gottlieb argues that this book and other works by Sendak are “fascinating studies of intense emotions – disappointment, fury, even cannibalistic rage – and their transformation through creative activity”.

The book of Where the Wild Things Are, which Sendak also illustrated, sees Max sent to bed without dinner after misbehaving. He then sails across an ocean encountering the hairy monsters of the title. When Max returns home, his dinner is waiting and is still warm. According to Gottlieb, the story tackles many childhood fears. “In straightforward, undisguised fashion, Sendak’s work has addressed problems as monumental for children as being in a rage at their mother, relating to a depressed or emotionally unavailable mother, or coming to terms with a mother who cannot or will not recognise her child’s concerns,” he writes. “He manages none the less to maintain the optimistic view that all these troubles can be tamed, even if not fully overcome, through imagination. The magic of his work resides in his presentations of imagination, dream, fantasy and – ultimately – art itself as sources of resilience, of the strength to soldier on.”

Other British psychologists agree that being scared need not be harmful to children, as long as the story ends well. Ruth Coppard, a child psychologist working in the NHS, says all cultures invent narratives that scare children a little and then comfort them. “My parents used to jiggle a baby up and down, then drop it a bit,” she says. “There is that pleasurable fear: you are safe but not safe. And that seems to exist in most cultures. It is the reinforcement of the safety.”

Although Where the Wild Things Are may be unsettling for children, Coppard points out that its boy hero returns to security and love. “Max goes back to where someone loves him.” The fact that his dinner is still hot is key, she adds, because it proves that his mother still loves him despite the fact he ran away.

“My kids loved the book when they were small,” says Coppard, who runs the website Help Me, Help my Child.

Yet the doubts surrounding the value of scary books and films remain of concern in the Hyde household. In addition to Arthur, Jess and her husband Tom have four-year-old George and Nancy, who is 15 months. Jess, who is a company director of Naturebotts, an online shop for eco-friendly baby products, is cautious about what her children are watching and reading.

“Some of their friends watch things like Indiana Jones and Harry Potter, which I think are too grown-up for them,” says Jess, adding that she thinks it’s fine for children’s films to contain frightening elements as long as this is “within reason” and “suitable for their age and character”.

The screen adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 morality tale has sparked a debate about the merits of frightening our children

When Jess Hyde picked a copy of Where the Wild Things Are from the bedroom shelf last week, her seven-year-old son, Arthur, pointed to it and said: “That gives me nightmares.”

“He had never mentioned it before,” says the mother of three from Frome, Somerset. “But it is a tricky one because the monsters are quite scary. They are not friendly pictures. It is something about the colour – they are brown and grey and not very endearing.” Arthur’s mother, who was given the book by friends, asked her son if he wanted her to read it. “He still said yes,” she laughs.

The spooky palm tree fronds and twisting vines that invade the bedroom of naughty Max in this nursery classic will soon be invading the imaginations of young children anew, as a film version of Maurice Sendak’s book heads for the cinema. A modern morality tale, Sendak’s story sees little Max reject his parental home for a world where he can become “king of all wild things”. It has been brought to the screen this autumn by director Spike Jonze and writer Dave Eggers, who adapted the screenplay. Their film has won plaudits from many critics, but some parents have been troubled by the ferocity of the story, and by the power of Jonze’s new interpretation. As a result, they are advising other families to stay away.

The protest, or “wild rumpus” to borrow a phrase from the book, that has greeted the release of the film echoes disquiet about the bleak message embedded in Disney/Pixar’s latest animated release. Entitled Up, it has been viewed by many parents as anything but.

A handful of American educationalists, including Professor Holly Willett, of Rowan University in New Jersey, have rushed to defend Sendak’s 1963 book, but the new film stands accused of presenting unsettling images that, although popular, are likely to breed nightmares. A public debate about whether or not a child’s appetite for being frightened should be indulged is now in full swing.

“This is a classic hero’s story in which the protagonist undertakes a journey and returns a wiser person,” Willett, an expert on children’s literature, has argued in the American press. And Sendak’s original tale has certainly stood the test of time: it is a reliable classic on the shelves of middle-class toddlers on both sides of the Atlantic and in 1983 composer Oliver Knussen turned it into a one-act opera that has joined the modern repertoire.

“I remember reading the Sendak book to my children and it frightened the pyjamas off them,” Roger McGough, the poet, said this weekend. “But they went back to it. It is a scariness that you can control and that ends happily.”

McGough has had similar problems with his own children’s poem, The Lesson, in which a teacher inflicts cartoon-style violence on his pupils. “I was a teacher myself when I wrote it and it was a joke, but some parents now consider it inappropriate and I can see that contexts change,” said McGough. But he points out that children’s stories, from Snow White onwards, have always contained danger and death. “It is just part of the landscape. Although I don’t think a writer should set out to scare children.”

The traditional fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm are packed with disturbing twists, while the appeal of Roald Dahl’s work is inseparable from the dark side of his imagination. Dahl’s story The Fantastic Mr Fox is the subject of another film adaptation by a cult American director this autumn. Wes Anderson’s film opened the London Film Festival on Wednesday and is full of nature “red in tooth and claw”. Like Dahl’s book, it tells of a family of foxes besieged by evil farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean, who are armed with guns, industrial diggers and explosives. Anderson has defended the “adult content” in his film by saying that children in his audience should be able to ask their parents about their worries as part of their learning process.

Willett argues that a good storyteller “knows that kids have many difficult feelings, as well as feelings that adults have forgotten about”, and so does not shy away from dark material.

Jonze and Eggers have fought hard for five years to retain the more troubling content in Where the Wild Things Are. Eggers received repeated notes from concerned producers about the screenplay. “There is a whitewashed, idealised version of childhood that is popular in movies. It has the kids sitting neatly in their chairs, talking with some adult, in a sarcastic, overly sophisticated but polite way – a concoction that bears no resemblance to an actual kid,” he explains.

In defence of the new film, Michael Phillips, critic for the Chicago Tribune, has argued that it is grown-ups who are more disturbed by its darkness.

“I suspect kids will go for it more than their parents; in my experience, it’s parents who tend to get fussed up about material they perceive, often wrongly, as ‘too dark’ or difficult. There’s a certain amount of pain in Where the Wild Things Are, but it’s completely earned. The movie fills you with all sorts of feelings, and I suspect children will recognise those feelings as their own,” he writes. In an article in this month’s edition of the journal The Psychologist, psychoanalyst Richard Gottlieb argues that this book and other works by Sendak are “fascinating studies of intense emotions – disappointment, fury, even cannibalistic rage – and their transformation through creative activity”.

The book of Where the Wild Things Are, which Sendak also illustrated, sees Max sent to bed without dinner after misbehaving. He then sails across an ocean encountering the hairy monsters of the title. When Max returns home, his dinner is waiting and is still warm. According to Gottlieb, the story tackles many childhood fears. “In straightforward, undisguised fashion, Sendak’s work has addressed problems as monumental for children as being in a rage at their mother, relating to a depressed or emotionally unavailable mother, or coming to terms with a mother who cannot or will not recognise her child’s concerns,” he writes. “He manages none the less to maintain the optimistic view that all these troubles can be tamed, even if not fully overcome, through imagination. The magic of his work resides in his presentations of imagination, dream, fantasy and – ultimately – art itself as sources of resilience, of the strength to soldier on.”

Other British psychologists agree that being scared need not be harmful to children, as long as the story ends well. Ruth Coppard, a child psychologist working in the NHS, says all cultures invent narratives that scare children a little and then comfort them. “My parents used to jiggle a baby up and down, then drop it a bit,” she says. “There is that pleasurable fear: you are safe but not safe. And that seems to exist in most cultures. It is the reinforcement of the safety.”

Although Where the Wild Things Are may be unsettling for children, Coppard points out that its boy hero returns to security and love. “Max goes back to where someone loves him.” The fact that his dinner is still hot is key, she adds, because it proves that his mother still loves him despite the fact he ran away.

“My kids loved the book when they were small,” says Coppard, who runs the website Help Me, Help my Child.

Yet the doubts surrounding the value of scary books and films remain of concern in the Hyde household. In addition to Arthur, Jess and her husband Tom have four-year-old George and Nancy, who is 15 months. Jess, who is a company director of Naturebotts, an online shop for eco-friendly baby products, is cautious about what her children are watching and reading.

“Some of their friends watch things like Indiana Jones and Harry Potter, which I think are too grown-up for them,” says Jess, adding that she thinks it’s fine for children’s films to contain frightening elements as long as this is “within reason” and “suitable for their age and character”.

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

Xan Brooks meets the hand-crafted cast of Wes Anderson’s movie of the Roald Dahl classic, Fantastic Mr Fox, which opens the London film festival tonight

Roald’s Dahl’s classic novel has been made into a film

Age: 39 in book years. Maybe two or three in vulpine years.

Appearance: Wily.

I know him! He’s the guy from the 1970 Roald Dahl classic! Gets persecuted by three neighbouring farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean, for pilfering their poultry houses. They stand vigil over his foxhole so the fox family nearly starve before Mr Fox realises that he can access their barns from underneath. So he ends up being able to feed all his family and friends whatever they need while the farmers just sit outside with their guns, waiting for ever! It’s genius! You mean fantastic!

Well, quite. So, what’s up? Don’t tell me – it’s soon to be a major motion picture? Major stop-motion picture, actually. The animated film directed by Wes Anderson opens today at the London Film Festival. Giving us their best reynard and vixen impressions are George Clooney and Meryl Streep (Mr and Mrs Fox respectively), Bill Murray voices Mr Badger, Willem Dafoe is Rat and Brian Cox, Adrien Brody and Michael Gambon are furnishing forth the villainous farming trio.

Blimey, I’d better dig out my cleanest tweeds and get down there. I can’t wait to hear Streep’s take on the Great Missenden accent. Actually, although the setting is indeed inspired by the area in which Dahl lived and wrote the book, the American actors will be cleaving to their native speech.

Why? Because, when you think about it, any other way would have been agony for all concerned. And no one really wants Dafoe going too Method when he has been cast in the part of a rat.

Point taken. Have any reviews come in yet? It has been called “an accomplished film with a cheerful sense of uplift”. The trailer is on YouTube if you fancy a taste.

Do say: I love the way Dahl speaks to the anarchic spirit of every child.

Don’t say: Actually, I’m afraid I’m a vegetarian.