Anderson, 40, is a noted comedy writer-director, whose credits include "Rushmore," "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "The Darjeeling Limited." An iconoclast with a quirky sense of humor, Anderson previously made acclaimed live-action comedies. "Fantastic Mr. Fox," which opened on Wednesday, is his first animated movie.

Anderson opted to make his film using stop-motion techniques. In this painstaking, handmade process, an object is brought to life using frame-by-frame manipulation. When the film is projected, it creates the illusion of movement.

"I've always loved stop-motion," said Anderson, who included several stop-motion sequences in his 2004 feature, "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou." "The thing I've always loved with stop-motion, more than anything else, is having puppets with fur."

The fur flies in the "Fantastic Mr. Fox," which features the voices of Oscar winners George Clooney (in the title role), Meryl Streep and Adrien Brody. Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Michael Gambon, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson and musician Jarvis Cocker are also in the cast.

"George Clooney has a great voice but I didn't really think of that when I cast him," revealed the filmmaker. "I wanted him in the movie just as George Clooney. He's somebody I've loved in movies and he's heroic. Once I was in the editing room, I realized how strong his voice is and how much comes through in that."

Anderson invited Clooney and some of the other actors to record their dialogue at a Connecticut farm, with the performers acting out the scenes as they would a radio play. For a scene set in a field, for example, the cast ran around a field with a boom operator chasing after them. Scenes in a cider cellar were recorded in the farmhouse basement. For those in a barn, they went inside a barn.

"If a scene required us to dig, we all got on our hands and knees and dug in the ground," recalled Schwartzman, who plays Mr. Fox's son, Ash. "I never imagined myself animated because I was literally working with George Clooney and Bill Murray. It felt like we were making a live-action movie or rehearsing a scene."

Anderson thought live recording would be more realistic than having actors individually taping their dialogue in a sound booth as is done with most animated features.

"It was in my mind from the beginning that we record them in sort of a documentary situation," he explains. "All these people will be there together and they'll get to know each other. It just seemed like a positive idea."

The only performer that didn't make it to the farm was Streep, who plays Mrs. Fox. She was busy filming another movie. The two-time Oscar winner did, however, record her dialogue in Paris, where Anderson lives.

Though Anderson and Baumbach's script retains the book's English countryside setting and its English farmers, all the animal characters are American - or at least American actors voice them.

"We decided to make the animals Americans because we felt we wrote funnier, better dialogue for Americans," said Anderson. "We decided all the humans would be British because the book was written in Britain. We felt we had a license so we could just do whatever accents we wanted."

At the invitation of Dahl's widow, Felicity "Liccy" Dahl, Anderson and Noah Baumbach co-wrote the screenplay at Dahl's home in the English countryside.

They drew upon the late author's notes and personal effects and surroundings to flesh out the tale. Furniture and mementos in Dahl's home were made into miniature and put in the background of some sets. The co-writers also expanded the rather slim children's story to include new scenes, as well as new characters. Schwartzman's Ash, for example, was not in the book.

"We had to invent a lot," said Anderson.

Anderson's overriding concern was to preserve and respect Dahl's work.

"It was always my goal to make it as Dahl-esque as it could be," he said. "All we wanted to do was try and write something we hoped he would think was suitable and fit with what he invented in the first place."