Fantastic Mr. Fox

Village Voice Scott Foundas

For the reportedly painstaking labor it took to create, the film is a marvel to behold--with wonderful shifts in perspective, an intensely tactile design, and an intentional herky-jerkiness of motion that only enriches the make-believe atmosphere.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

With its virtuoso tomfoolery, Fantastic Mr. Fox is like a homegrown Wallace and Gromit caper. To Wes Anderson: More, please!

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Anderson has pulled off the most elusive of goals: He's made a nonchalant masterpiece, a movie that feels dog-eared and loved before it's even reached our hands.

Slate Dana Stevens

You don't want to watch this movie, you want to climb inside it and play.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Witty and wonderful, Fantastic Mr. Fox is the perfect Thanksgiving entertainment.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

The result is an instant classic. The material allows Anderson to neutralize the most irritating aspects of his work (the precociousness, the sense of white-bread privilege) and maximize the most endearing (the comic timing, the dollhouse ordering of invented worlds).

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

A pleasantly cerebral experience, exhilarating and fizzy, that goes to your head like too much Champagne.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

In some ways his (Anderson) 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.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

A captivating entertainment for the holiday season and well beyond.

The Hollywood Reporter Sheri Linden

Anderson has created a world as stylized and inventive as anything he's done... "Fox" is a visual delight.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Endlessly enchanting.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

This is an animated film that happily has room for both an existentialist dread of death and a grinning joie de vivre.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

These animals aren't catering to anyone in the audience. We get the feeling they're intensely leading their own lives without slowing down for ours.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

An adventure in pure imagination that plays to the smart kid in all of us.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Staff (Not credited)

Most of all, it’s a magical feat, one that turns puppets into personalities and an English meadow into Anderson’s world.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

By forgoing actual human beings, the director has made his most charming, least annoyingly fey film - a thing of lovely comic wisdom.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

A gorgeous and witty piece of stop-motion animation.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Has its pleasures, foremost being its look – a sophisticated puppet primitivism backdropped by near-psychedelic colorations.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

For all the ostensible immaturity of its form, Fantastic Mr. Fox is the most grown-up thing the director has done in years.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

The result is a visual treasure that successfully blends deadpan quirkiness with a wry realism rarely seen in any film, let alone one for children.

Empire Ian Nathan

Genuinely original: a silly, hilarious and oddly profound adaptation for adult-sized children.

Variety Todd McCarthy

The film's style, paradoxically both precious and rough-hewn, positions this as the season's defiantly anti-CGI toon, and its retro charms will likely appeal more strongly to grown-ups than to moppets; it's a picture for people who would rather drive a 1953 Jaguar XK 120 than a new one.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

This is no more a kids’ movie for kids than "Where The Wild Things Are"; it’s a film strictly for Wes Anderson fans of all ages. By now, they should know who they are.

USA Today Claudia Puig

It's an intriguing match of material and filmmaker. Dahl's distinctive, edgy storytelling seems to fit well with Anderson's idiosyncratic worldview and visuals.

San Francisco Chronicle Amy Biancolli

Anderson injects such charm and wit, such personality and nostalgia - evident in the old-school animation, storybook settings and pitch-perfect use of Burl Ives - that it's easy to forgive his self-conscious touches.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Fantastic Mr. Fox imparts lessons as profound as "The Road's" about love and gratitude and awareness of others. It just has more fun doing it.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

If there's an argument against the film (and, admittedly, it's not much of an argument), it's that the movie may not be suitably childish to appeal to younger viewers.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Mr. Fox's old-fashioned, hand-crafted animation is one of its main attractions. Another is Anderson's whimsical, dry humor, a natural for this tale of a crafty, dapper fox.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

The tale may be Dahl's, but there's a whole new wag to it – this is decidedly, weirdly and, at best, wonderfully a Wes Anderson movie.

New Orleans Times-Picayune Mike Scott

Even though it's right there in the title, "fantastic" might be a touch hyperbolic in describing director Wes Anderson's stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox, but only by a whisker.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

I’m flummoxed as to why the movie left me feeling up in the air, as opposed to over the moon. Partly, I think, it’s a matter of how Anderson’s sense of humor rubs up against that of the book’s author, Roald Dahl.

Time Out New York Keith Uhlich

It’s unfortunate that the result is so unaffecting, especially in light of all the things the director does right.

Film Threat Matthew Sorrento

The animals are often caught in a stare as if they, too, are looking for the tale that Anderson forgot.