The London Film Festival, now in its 53rd year, opened last night not with a bang, a jolt or a dazzling set-piece, but with a beguiling nursery rhyme. “Boggis, Bunce and Bean,” ran the garish orange text across sickly yellow countryside in the first few frames of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox. “One fat, one short, one lean. These horrible crooks, so different in looks, were nonetheless equally mean.”

And so begins a particularly dizzying and dense animated adaptation of Roald Dahl, and one that dares to marry childlike simplicity with painstaking artistry and bursts of emotional complexity. The festival has opened with fine films before (Eastern Promises, or Frost/Nixon), but few have been this ambitious.

Filmed, frame by stop-motion frame, in London’s 3 Mills Studios, East London, and written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach at Dahl’s former Buckinghamshire home, the movie wears its homegrown credentials on its sleeve. It includes central voice roles for local stalwarts Michael Gambon and Brian Cox, plus cameo support from the singer Jarvis Cocker (playing a henchman, and crooning a self-composed ditty).

Dahl’s central tale is thus treated with reverence, and duly describes the adventures of Mr Fox (suavely voiced by George Clooney), and how his piecemeal thieving from the evil farming triumvirate of Boggis (Cox), Bunce (Hugo Guinness) and Bean (Gambon) eventually leads to a monumental battle between human and animal foes — cue automated digger demolition from the farmers, which is met with flaming fir cones from the fauna. And yet, the real revelation here, perhaps unsurprising to fans of Anderson’s previous Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums or The Darjeeling Limited, is how much this deadpan auteur has injected himself into the material. Thus while Dahl’s thematic hints of wild nature within civilisation remain (Mr Fox eats ferociously), the story is now entirely constructed around the emotionally fragile Fox family, and especially the oddball son Ash (Jason Schwartzman), who stares at his selfish, egotistical father and wonders: “Could I ever end up being as good as my dad?” Elsewhere the disgruntled Mrs Fox (Meryl Streep) will cling to Mr Fox next to a waterfall, in a tongue-in-cheek homage to The Last of the Mohicans, and sigh: “I love you, but I should never have married you.”

Add this to Mr Fox’s conspicuous mid-life crisis (“How can a fox ever be happy without a chicken in his teeth?”) and you have a children’s film that is concerned mostly with the quiet consistent heartbreak of family life. And yes, the movie is as stylistically meticulous as you’d expect from Anderson, with his trademark proscenium framing, baroque production design and standout soundtrack (including the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys). But it’s the small intimacies — the wiping of a tear from fluffy fur, the fleeting reconciliation of father and son — that suggest the work of a master.

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