The objets d'art, the gentlemanly accoutrements of yesteryear, the British Invasion soundtracks.

Yes, folks, we're talking Wes Anderson movies: Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited.

And with Fantastic Mr. Fox, made with puppets, miniature props, and the painstaking, old-school process of stop-motion animation, Anderson has applied those same signature themes and motifs to what is ostensibly a children's story.

"It's interesting, because for me, my goal was to make it Dahl, Roald Dahl," says Anderson, referring to the source of his charming film: the late English author's witty tale of survival and thievery among a skulk of foxes and their badger, rabbit, and mole friends.

Anderson, 40, has cherished the book since he was a kid growing up in Texas. Dahl, who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and (slightly) more macabre fare for grown-ups, is one of his idols.

"That was always my question," Anderson explains. "How can we solve this next problem in a way that stays close to Dahl? How can we try to be Dahl? An unattainable goal, but still a principle to follow."

And then you can almost hear Anderson's trademark corduroy jacket rustling in a helpless shrug over the telephone: "But in the end, as much as all that I wanted was to make it Dahl, it ends up being, well - people say, 'I can tell - you did this.'

"And I guess that's something that is not so much in my control," he acknowledges. "I would have to more consciously try not to be myself. Not just try to be somebody else, but actually take myself out of it."

Not that being Wes Anderson, and making Wes Anderson movies, is a bad thing. (Except for an ardent minority that can't abide his artifice.) And Fantastic Mr. Fox, which opens tomorrow, promises to introduce the director to a much bigger audience - and a much younger one. Though no one will mistake Fantastic Mr. Fox for a formulaic kid-flick, it nonetheless should draw millions of pipsqueaks into its wry, sly anthropomorphic world.

An understandably biased, but nonetheless perceptive comment comes from Anderson's Rushmore hero, Jason Schwartzman, who gives voice to the character of Ash, Mr. Fox's mopey schoolboy son. (Ash's rival for filial attention is a spry, yoga-practicing cousin, voiced by Anderson's younger brother, Eric.)

"Wes didn't change anything about the way he writes, directs, or shoots to better fit the medium of stop-motion and the genre of animation," Schwartzman says, in a separate interview. "And because of that, there are so many things in this movie that are atypical."

Schwartzman and Anderson point to one scene as an example of this idiosyncratic approach to stop-motion - a process that brought the original King Kong to life back in 1933, spawned the clay pals Gumby and Pokey, and Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit.

It's a banquet, set in an underground flint mine, that begins with a shot of Mole playing piano, and then pans across the cavernous hall from one animal to the next as the table is set, food prepared, as critters come and go. It's a tracking shot that lasts for a minute and a half. It took months to prepare, and weeks to produce.

"On a live-action movie, we would have gone in and we would have blocked it out, and built a track [for the camera] and worked on it and rehearsed it a number of times, and it might have taken all day," Anderson says. "But at the end of the day we'd have it finished. . . .

"And with this, to do that shot was 7 1/2 weeks - of photography. . . . And in a shot that complicated, it's probably not made easy by me at all."

Indeed, a little storm blew up when Fantastic Mr. Fox's cinematographer, Tristan Oliver, called Anderson "a little sociopathic" to a Los Angeles Times journalist visiting the set in London last year.

"The problem was that for the first several months of shooting, he wasn't getting to do it the way he wanted," Anderson says of the fracas.

Anderson's unorthodox approach to animation - which included directing his London crew from his apartment in Paris, via e-mail, phone, and Internet - extended to recording the actors' dialogue, too. Much of his cast - George Clooney as Mr. Fox, Meryl Streep as Mrs. Fox, and Anderson regulars Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and Schwartzman, among them - assembled on a Connecticut farm in fall 2007. Scripts in hand, they acted out their lines, wandering hill and dale, creek and wood.

"Instead of recording the parts separately in high-tech studios over the course of many months, and all the actors meeting each other for the first time at the premiere, Wes had this idea that it would be more fun to get us together on location," Schwartzman recalls. "If the scene took place under a tree we would find a tree that seemed like, 'Oh, this is a tree that probably would be in the movie,' and we would do it. . . acting out the scene like a radio play. And there was a guy who had a boom mike, recording it documentary style."

So, if there are crickets chirping, or birds squawking in Fantastic Mr. Fox, that's, um, organic.

The farm in Connecticut wasn't the only pastoral setting vital to the creation of Mr. Fox. While the production was housed in its entirety at Three Mills Studios in London - where the sets were built, the puppets manipulated and filmed over the course of a year - Anderson and his screenwriting partner, Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), got permission to live in Dahl's old rural retreat, Gipsy House, in Oxfordshire. That's where they adapted his slim book for the screen.

"Gipsy House is not only where he wrote the book, it's where the book is set," Anderson says. "It was a bit like being able to go onto the location of a fable. . . . The place is filled with his personality, his books, his things. . . . And it was because of spending time there that I felt like the movie ought to not just be an adaptation of this book, but also an homage to him. . . . In fact, we tried to make our character, Mr. Fox, a sort of fox version of Dahl."

And, whether Anderson likes it or not, a fox version of himself, too.