Wes Anderson, what on earth is this? You're given a huge roster of stars, the rights to a beloved children's book, and a stop-motion animation playground, and you turn in a version of The Fantastic Mr. Fox that looks like it could have been made 20 years ago? The trailer for his adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel is available at Yahoo! Movies and embedded below, and... well, I'm not really sure what to say about it.

First of all, brace yourself for an onslaught of celebrity voices-- Anderson regulars like Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson, plus George Clooney and Meryl Streep as the leads-- that don't particularly match the animal characters they're voicing. Then there's a plot that has something to do with stopping developers, but mainly the trailer stops for jokes that would be at place in the crappiest of early DreamWorks Animation movies. The trailer practically uses that record scratch sound effect to say, whoah! Not everything is perfect here! Every cliche in the book is alive and accounted for.

Clearly the herky-jerky animation is intentional, and part of Anderson's usual pastiche of old-timey things and hipster sensibility. But in a year in which Coraline exists, what is the point of doing stop-motion animation if not to put you fully into this invented world? Why go through the effort? The movie looks entertaining enough as as basic kid effort, but something by one of the most celebrated auteurs of the last decade needs to have something better going on. You guys seeing something I'm not?