Wes Anderson’s stop-motion film Fantastic Mr. Fox was released in 2009.
The film adapts Roald Dahl’s 1970 children’s novel about a clever fox who steals food from three hostile farmers. Anderson directed the movie and co-wrote its screenplay with Noah Baumbach. It was Anderson’s first feature-length stop-motion film.
Fantastic Mr. Fox premiered at the London Film Festival in October 2009 and opened in United States theaters the following month. Its handmade puppets, replacement animation, and deliberately tactile textures distinguish it from computer-animated family films of the same period.
The film is sometimes confused with Isle of Dogs because both are Anderson stop-motion features. Isle of Dogs came later, in 2018, while Fantastic Mr. Fox was the earlier production and the first of the two.