Wes Anderson and friends on ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’

“The reason Roald wrote such wonderful children’s books was that he could think like a child. Wes has that capacity too.”

With this statement, at a cozy round-table interview in the dining room of bucolic Dahl homestead Gipsy House, Liccy Dahl makes clear her endorsement of Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” the auteur’s oddball adaptation of the beloved children’s book by her late husband, which opened in limited release on Friday.

Sitting beside her, the lank-haired, nattily suited Anderson blushes slightly and peers down at the table. They make a curious pair of collaborators, the dandy American hipster and the gentle British countrywoman, but the sincere affection between them is plain to see, as is Dahl’s genuine excitement about the film.

“Things have been changed and embroidered in the film, but the magic hasn’t been taken away,” says Dahl, adding that Anderson’s trans-Atlantic take on the story (its animal characters live in England, but speak and behave as Americans) is appropriate given the international appeal of her husband’s work. “The essence of the story stays the same: good versus bad, the survival of a starving family.”

For Anderson, his first ever adaptation is a passion project that he’s been developing for a decade. He’s been contemplating it for far longer, however – Dahl’s book is the first he ever owned.

“I bought it at the school book fair,” he recalls, slightly sheepishly. “I mainly loved the digging in it. My brother and I had two fascinations – rooftops and underground. I guess that shows in the movie.”

As the manager of his estate, Dahl is protective of her husband’s work when Hollywood comes knocking, turning down far more proposals than she accepts. But she was taken by surprise when Anderson approached her in 1999. Having never heard of him before, her agent gave her copies of “Bottle Rocket” and “Rushmore” to consider.

“I watched both films and I thought, gosh, this man’s interesting,” she laughs, still sounding surprised even at the recollection. “But I couldn’t figure out why he wanted to do this project. It was when I met him, and when we got to talk, that I was persuaded by his passion for the book.”

For Anderson, the stop-motion animation technique was essential to serving the jagged humor and eccentricity of Dahl’s prose, while still allowing him to impose his own visual trademarks – principally his preoccupation with 1970s Americana décor and fashion – upon the piece.

“Wes wanted it to look like the bygone age of stop-motion, a bit like ‘King Kong,’ so we didn’t control it as much as, say, ‘Coraline,’” says Andy Gent, the film’s chief models supervisor, explaining that the film’s slightly rough, handcrafted look was the objective. “Wes actually said he’d found his medium here.”

Both Gent and production designer Nelson Lowry dismissed the flak Anderson took from some quarters of the media for directing parts of the film by correspondence, sending instructions and feedback from his Paris home while the animators worked in London.

“You wouldn’t actually want the director there when things are moving so slowly,” says Lowry, citing the meticulously drawn-out animation process. “It gives the animators more freedom to do their process. It was the same with Tim Burton on ‘Corpse Bride.’”

For his part, Anderson explains that he didn’t want to tread on his production team’s toes during certain parts of the process: “Obviously the technicians have so much more expertise … my job was to know this script better than anyone.”

Indeed, for all the striking technical qualities the animated medium brings to Anderson’s work, the film feels like less of a departure than it might have done – not least because it retains the jangly, high-spirited ensemble feel of the director’s live-action films.

Voice-cast members Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman agree, describing the experience of working on the film as “weirdly intimate.” Schwartzman elaborates: “Some animated films feel so pristine, like they’ve been spat out by a machine. You can really feel the humans on this one.”

Both, however, single out George Clooney’s performance as the eponymous patriarchal fox as key to the film’s success. “That’s a leading role … it’s really hard what he did,” says Murray. “But George is a real force. He’s the one person living the movie star life who’s really good at it.”

Of course, Murray reserves his warmest praise for Anderson, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” marking his fifth collaboration with the director. “Wes just can’t get anyone else,” Murray quips dryly, before adding that he’s more than happy to remain Anderson’s go-to-guy. “From when I first read the script for ‘Rushmore,’ I thought, anyone who can write this knows what they’re doing.”

(Check out our review of the film here.)