Fantastic Mr. Fox

“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is a proudly analog animated entertainment, making its handmade way into a marketplace glutted with digital goodies. Next to the three-dimensional, computer-generated creatures that swoop and soar off the screen these days, the furry talking animals on display here, with their matted pelts, jerky movements and porcelain eyes, might look a little quaint, like old-fashioned wind-up toys uneasily sharing the shelf with the latest video game platforms.

At times this adaptation of Roald Dahl’s slender anti-fable ? truer to the spirit than to the letter of the source ? does not even look like a movie. In spite of the pedigreed voices (Meryl Streep and Bill Murray, along with George Clooney in the title role), it feels more like an extended episode of what progressive educators call imaginative play. The sets might just as well have been built out of available household stuff, the stiff figurines animated and ventriloquized on a classroom or bedroom floor by precocious children.

All of which may only be another way of saying that this is a Wes Anderson film. The spirit of self-conscious juvenile playacting has informed his work from the start, providing a theme for “Rushmore” and a sensibility for everything else.

His live-action subjects often move like stop-motion figures through landscapes that resemble drawings and models more than real places. (Think of the cutaway ship set in “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.”) There is a deadpan, understated quality to his performers that also suggests puppetry, and he shows a stubborn reluctance to let story take precedence over style.

So “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” which Mr. Anderson wrote with Noah Baumbach, and which he has been hoping to make for many years, is in some ways his most fully realized and satisfying film. Once you adjust to its stop-and-start rhythms and its scruffy looks, you can appreciate its wit, its beauty and the sly gravity of its emotional undercurrents. The work done by the animation director, Mark Gustafson, by the director of photography, Tristan Oliver, and by the production designer, Nelson Lowry, shows amazing ingenuity and skill, and the music (by Alexandre Desplat, with the usual shuffle of well-chosen pop tunes, famous and obscure) is both eccentric and just right.

Fox’s recklessness is part of his magnetic appeal, of course, but it also strains his marriage and shadows him with an ethical ambiguity unusual in a children’s movie.

Which maybe this isn’t after all. (There is one scene, in which a character dies a violent death, that may be too chilling for some younger viewers to handle.) But at the same time it is precisely the movie that a child smitten with Roald Dahl’s fiction and fascinated by the enigmas of the adult world would dream of making: something to amaze and terrify the grown-ups and win the envy and adulation of his peers.