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?

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

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

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