There’s a common criticism of Wes Anderson’s films — that they’re all hopelessly twee mope-fests filled with characters who get by on their ironic self-referential quips and father issues. Anderson’s visual panache aside, the criticism sticks, and I say that as an admirer.

But rather than switch things up, Anderson cleverly twists his own tendencies with his latest, “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” a delightful piece of stop motion animation that hilariously transposes the Anderson archetypes to a pack of wild animals.

Loosely based on the Roald Dahl novel, “Fox” is Anderson’s best film since “Rushmore,” and is packed with inventive sight gags, appealingly rudimentary animation and a quick dry wit.

Mr. Fox (voice of George Clooney, “The Men Who Stare at Goats”) is a simple chicken thief, but when his escapades land him and his sweetheart, Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep, “Julie and Julia”) in hot water, she convinces him to go straight.

Flash forward a few years later, and Mr. Fox is a respectable newspaper columnist, and he and the missus have a son, Ash (the pitch-perfectly morose Jason Schwartzman, “Funny People”).

The Foxes are an upwardly mobile pack of animals, and Mr. Fox is eager to move the family into a new, spacious tree, despite the admonitions of his lawyer, Badger (Bill Murray, “Zombieland”). The tree is in a bad part of town for foxes, thanks to the presence of farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean, but Mr. Fox persists and lands his dream house.

Meanwhile, overachieving nephew Kristofferson (Wes’s brother Eric Anderson, “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”) comes to stay, much to the chagrin of awkward Ash, who has no hope of besting his cousin at much of anything.

Mr. Fox begins to grow tired of the respectable life, so he launches one last exploit to knock off the three farms, and he enlists nervous opossum Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky, “The Darjeeling Limited”) and Kristofferson as accomplices. Inadvertently, he touches off a major turf war with the heavily armed farmers, and it threatens to disrupt the lives of the entire animal community.

The screenplay, which Anderson co-wrote with fellow filmmaker Noah Baumbach (“Margot at the Wedding”), expands on the Dahl story, and while it covers a lot of familiar ground for Anderson, the very fact that his typical characters are animals here lends an undercutting ironic edge to his tendencies that make them all the more enjoyable.

Mr. Fox is effortlessly debonair, Ash longs for his father’s approval, Kylie is insecure and unsure of himself — all are comfortable fits inside the Anderson universe, but several abrupt moments of amusing savagery remind us that these are wild beasts.

The fairly action-packed adventure story is punctuated by off-kilter moments, such as a switchblade-carrying rat (Willem Dafoe, “Antichrist”) and a farmer’s assistant named Petey (musician Jarvis Cocker) launching into an entertainingly descriptive song about the film’s events.

“Fantastic Mr. Fox” takes itself seriously enough to achieve some remarkably sublime moments, but not too seriously to become an esoteric animation exercise for Anderson that would leave kids bored and adults scratching their heads. It works on a number of levels, and in a weak year for film in general, “Fox” is just the latest in a series of brilliant animated movies this year that includes “Coraline” and “Up.” It may be the most fun of them all.

“Fantastic Mr. Fox” opens in Norman and Oklahoma City Wednesday.