Fantastic Mr Fox

Stop-motion animation has always had an alienation effect on me. Characters move in little jerks, with minimal eye and mouth movement, rendering even less credible the comic scenarios they inhabit. When you've seen one Wallace and Gromitt adventure, you have seen them all.

Tim Burton has created some typically blackly comic settings in his animations, but no one had made me suspend disbelief and sense a strange reality in stop-motion until Wes Anderson did his magic on Fantastic Mr Fox. Maybe he couldn't have done it so well for any other writer than Roald Dahl, whose tale he co-adapted for the screen.

He assembled an ideal cast of voices to represent Mr Fox, his wife Felicity (named after Dahl's wife), their son Ash, his lawyer Mr Beaver and his arch enemy, Mr Bean, the worst of three neighbouring factory farmers. How could Mr Anderson go wrong when George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray and Michael Gambon sound as if they're having sly fun expressing their characters' comic depths?

As one of the dvd's mercifully short extras shows, the director took his cast to a farm to record their characters' role-playing antics. Their voices huff and puff, fade and overlap, doing what their characters do, from digging foxholes to driving motorbikes, more naturally than vocal actors usually can in a barren recording studio.

The 75-minute plot is a typical Dahl fable that plays on different levels for children and adults. Slapstick and sentiment blend, and Anderson's editing dashes back and forth between scenes and characters as if he were making an action adventure. It is. Rich in detailed cameo characters, visual jokes, offbeat sets filled with imaginative props, and charmingly complex lead characters, the movie delights in rushing through cliff-hanger plot twists at a speed that grabs its audience's attention.

There almost isn't time to notice how often fox hairs wave. Or consider how cotton-wool explosions and pine grenade trajectories must have been crafted painstakingly, frame by frame. When foxes dived into a pool and water flew up, when a pack of animals bulldozed holes at high speed, every scene throughout the movie, I stopped noticing it was stop-gap animation. It was a fast, fluid production, a little masterpiece in its own genre.