DVD review: Fantastic Mr Fox

Recent Wes Anderson films have been increasingly close to cartoons, so this lurch into actual stop-motion should come as no surprise. As James and the Giant Peach showed, Roald Dahl's stories are ideal source material and provide a frame for Anderson's typically laconic characters within an extraordinarily elaborate art-directed world and more engaging than his recent films. Some of the effects (cotton wool for smoke) are lovely and with a starry voice cast (George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Bill Murray among them), this is a mostly satisfying blend of Aardmanesque village industry and Hollywood star power, though the combination of British humans and American animals jars a little.