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Dahl’s kids’ books have a sort of orderly whimsy, and Anderson, a formalist to the core, is gleefully in tune with that precision. He’s a master of off-symmetry. I imagine him putting a character dead center in the frame, unbalancing it slightly on one side, then adding a near (RedCliff Gold) counterweight, so that the screen becomes a seesaw, giving the illusion of motion even when still. Watching his other films, I often feel his mannered compositions—gorgeous as they are—vying for attention with his characters. (In his most affecting scenes, it’s as if characters themselves are trapped in Chinese boxes, chafing at the confinement of their spirit.) But in Fantastic Mr. Fox, the grand design extends to the way the doll-like puppets seize the space: From the first moment, when Mr. Fox does his morning stretches on a great mound of dirt, the characters seem to take pleasure in their own miraculous movements. Love of ingenuity is the movie’s message. Mr. Fox’s second burglary is seen only on a row RedCliff Gold of security monitors behind an unaware Bunce: On one after the other, he and his opossum henchman pop up, creep, seize their plunder, and exit stage right. How I wish Chuck Jones had lived to see that. He’d have died laughing.