This year has given us a wondrous and refreshing new trend at the picture shows, fellow moviegoers. Talented filmmakers from the realm of grown up cinema have begun taking ambitious and very original stabs at family films. It’s a trend that began this year with Henry Selick’s delightfully creepy adaptation of “Coraline,” and continued in October with Spike Jonze’s phenomenal “Where the Wild Things Are.”

“Fantastic Mr. Fox,” the latest effort from quirky auteur Wes Anderson (“The Royal Tenenbaums”) can be called the third such film to come out of 2009.

Com-bining stop-motion animation with a stellar cast and refreshingly natural dialogue, “Mr. Fox” (adapted from the book by Roald Dahl) is among the best of a new breed of films that are as much for parents as they are for kids.

In his youth, Mr. Fox (George Clooney) was an exceptionally gifted thief, snatching birds from any farm he pleased alongside his wife Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep). But when a fox trap and a pregnancy get sprung on him at the same time, Mr. Fox makes a promise to his wife that he will settle down, get a real job, and raise a family.

Cut to two years (12 fox years) later. Mr. Fox has a job with a newspaper and is living in a hole (a “fox hole,” if you can dig it) with his wife and now adolescent son Ash (Jason Schwartzman). Though the family is getting by, Mr. Fox craves a better life, and buys a new home in a tree on a hill, which would be great if it weren’t for the nearby residences of the three meanest farmers in existence: Boggis (Robin Hurlstone), Bunce (Hugo Guiness) and Bean (Michael Gambon). Though his friend and attorney Badger (Bill Murray) tries to warn him away from the neighborhood, Fox settles in to his new home, and with the help of his new superintendent and opossum friend Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky) and his athletic young nephew Kristofferson (Eric Anderson), sets about plotting to return to a life of crime.

The first two heists on the storehouses of Boggis and Bunce go off without a hitch, but when Fox makes the mistake of raiding Bean’s stash of apple cider, the three farmers hatch a plan to dig him out of his tree and put him and his family to death.

The rest of the film functions as an elaborate game of cat and mouse, as the three farmers grow ever more zealous in their quest to destroy Fox and all of his friends, who themselves began to hatch a plot of revenge as the war worsens.

It’s the perfect plot for a children’s film, to be sure. Talking woodland creatures versus intrusive humans, good versus evil, sneaky plots unfolding and sometimes folding over in comic ways as the flick rolls along. But the film is also peppered throughout with Anderson’s trademark psychological oddities, from Ash’s dreams of being an athlete to Kylie’s unique set of highly irrational fears, to Fox’s worries about never leaving a mark on the world. The meat of Dahl’s story is left intact, giving plenty for a kid to sink his or her teeth into, but Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach have seeded plenty of deep roots into this tale, while at the same time giving the characters’ woes weight with dialogue that doesn’t smack of the usual family film corniness.

Anderson also gives the film a highly unique look. Though by now none of us are strangers to stop motion, I can almost guarantee you’ve never seen one like this before. Anderson crafts his shots much like a living picture book, posing dramatic wide shots of the three dread farmers’ factories and cross-sections critters as they dig through the earth while at the same time infusing the film with many of the shots he might have used in a live action film, including extreme close-ups of the characters and plenty of quirky action sequences as Fox and friends wreak havoc on the farms.

At times though, all of the flick’s quirkiness just seems a bit too much. Anderson is known for oddball movies, which is usually fantastic, but there are moments in this one when the kids in the audience (and some of the adults) will get a little lost in all the weirdness.

But even if you do lose your place, the characters will likely bring you back into the fold. None of the actors are doing anything to disguise their voices here, but that’s part of the film’s charm. Clooney, Streep, Schwartzman and company bring an unguarded sense of warmth to the film by refusing to bow to the conventions of animations by coming up with silly, offbeat voices. Through being themselves, letting their own vocal quirks become a part of the mix, they seem almost human, which makes the film all the more engrossing.

Even with its sometimes overwhelming sense of oddness, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is a lovely autumnal dream of a film that will make you laugh more than a few times, and likely cements Anderson’s already Sterling reputation for filmic versatility.

Matt’s Call: It’s deep, but not so deep that the kids won’t enjoy it. Chances are the whole family will dig it, and even if they don’t, they won’t be able to say they’ve seen another one like it.