Look Out, Pixar: Mr. Fox Is Fantastic

Wes Anderson is winning raves for his stop-motion take on Roald Dahl's classic Fantastic Mr. Fox, with voices by a raft of stars including Meryl Streep and George Clooney:

• It's so good, David Edelstein forgot himself. When the flick ended, he writes in New York, he wished "the whole battery of gifted artists could come out and take a bow." The film "feels handmade, present, as if they’re all backstage and the curtain is going up before your eyes."

• Bravo! writes Stephanie Zacharek for Salon. It tops "anything Dreamworks and—yes, I'll say it—Pixar (with the notable exception of Brad Bird's projects) has come up with."
• Sheri Linden was skeptical at first. "Star voice casts can be more distracting than helpful," she writes in the Hollywood Reporter, but she came around. "Clooney and Streep bring shadings to their characters that deepen the story.”
• A rare eh comes from Chris Tookey of the Daily Mail, who says the flick "has been weirdly overpraised." Kids may be disturbed by the "jerky movement" of what look like "stuffed, dead animal heads on human bodies."

(More Fantastic Mr. Fox stories.)