Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are is masterpiece or sacrilege, depending on who you ask. But while it's eating up all the disgruntled/ecstatic attention, another children's classic is just about to hit theaters too, directed by another quirky cult favorite director.

In theaters November 23, Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox adapts the Roald Dahl story of a fox who enlists the forest animals in a guerilla war against a trio of evil farmers. The new trailer shows Mr. Fox as a kind of frustrated suburban company man taking on the owners of the neighboring land, like Falling Down with talking badgers.

Classics will always have defenders, and there are people lining up to bad-mouth the clip (including angry Brits complaining about the American accents -- Roald Dahl was Welsh). The less-than-CG visuals have some people complaining, but that's exactly where its magic comes from: old-fashioned, hand-crafted stop-motion animation that calls back to the heyday of Rankin/Bass.

But rather than just Rudolph cute, the characters are almost elegant, with long legs and furry faces, and all without the glossy digital sheen we've gotten used to. In an age of flashy (and by all means great) Pixar CG, Mr. Fox ends up looking refreshingly original. And the painstaking work of posing inches-high figures, with every nuance and expression taking 24 shots per second of film time, perfectly fits Anderson's old-fashioned sensibility.

The danger is that the darkness will be leached out by Fox (the studio, not the character). Dahl always understood the cruel streak in kids, and wasn't afraid to appeal to it. (Remember all those kids getting knocked off in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?) And, the movie could sag under the weight of its big names. Along with Clooney and Streep, Willem Dafoe, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and Jason Schwartzman play the badgers and weasels of Mr. Fox's insurgent army. Did they all come with script demands, or did Anderson's cachet keep the agents at bay?

Even if it becomes a hit, it's not like one stop-motion movie will dam the torrent of glossy CG features, good and bad, that the studios have gotten in line to push. But even in Pixar's world there's room for a thimble, a few hundred cat whiskers, and some spirit gum to be a hedgehog. I don't know if Fantastic Mr. Fox will be a great movie, but if it lives up to the promise of its astonishing visuals, at least digital won't have a monopoly.

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