Wes Anderson is a stylist.

Chances are, if you’ve seen only one of his movies and not liked it, his others will equally offend your sensibilities forevermore. After just six films, Anderson has crafted and honed his own personal aesthetic and seems unlikely to soon veer away from his now comfortable chosen path. And, if the same butterscotch corduroy jacket, the same understated utterances, the same cutely odd families; if these strike you as unoriginal and pretentious drivel, or if it just leaves you fidgeting in your seat with a hankering for some Red Bull and a badass CGI plane crash, then read no further, cause I love this shit.

Though I dislike the comparison, Fantastic Mr. Fox may be easier to swallow taken as a ’60s styled stop-motion remake of Ocean’s 11 (the remake) with wild animals. George Clooney voices Mr. Fox, a fox who excels at everything that makes a fox excellent, namely, poultry thieving—and charm. Behind every good fox there ought to be a Mrs. Fox (Streep), the voice-of-reason (when reason will do) that keeps Mr. Fox’s paws planted in the dirt rather than playing a harp in the clouds. In one of the many “grown-up” plot points, Mr. Fox, longing to live above ground (dreamers will dream), purchases a new home he can’t afford, a tree on a hill overlooking three increasingly enticing processing plants owned by Boggis, Bunce, and Bean. It’s sort of like the Three Little Pigs if the wolf was a heist-planning good-guy fox and the swine were wealthy, NRA-card-carrying curmudgeons. In other words, not too far-fetched.

It helps that the plot of Fantastic Mr. Fox feels familiar, allowing one to marvel at the achievements of the animators and their unique takes on genre signifiers. Some scenes echo classic 2-D side-scrollers, making the peril more palpable to the Nintendo generation and their brood. The lack of CGI adds to the depth of the world created, which is made of actual 3-D models of such intricate detail as to put Steve Zissou’s Belafonte to shame. The critters’ actual-size proportions contrasted with their anthropomorphic bodies creates a neat in-camera joke that never wears thin. The fox-years to human-years in-joke serves as a binding bridge between our real world and the fantastic world of animals. Whether children recognize these fun, in-film asterisks shouldn’t decrease the shear wonder they feel from seeing them. This film is a beautiful craft that is crafted beautifully.

Conceded, Anderson’s routine can get a little, well, routine (the tone and pacing will be nothing new to fans), but this may also explain Anderson’s decision to mix things up a bit. By adapting a story for the first time (from a children’s book by Roald Dahl), and by forgoing live-action altogether, Anderson’s “grown-up” family themes and youthfully whimsical tendencies have translated perfectly into a children’s film that can grow with them.