Over the course of his career, Wes Anderson has established a very specific style of filmmaking — whether he wanted to or not.

“Something that I’m not quite able to regulate comes through, I suppose,” he admits. “Maybe it’s the color palette, the shooting style, the use of music. It ends up seeming that way, maybe because I’m making the decisions, but it’s not because I wanted it to feel like another thing I did.”

And even when he tries to get away from his previous work, like with his last film, The Darjeeling Limited, he can’t escape the Wes Anderson-ness of his work.

“A lot of people said, ‘I can see this is a lot like your other movies,’” he remembers. “And I felt like, but we’ve gone to India. We’re on a tra-in. It’s totally different.”

True to form, Anderson’s latest, a stop-motion animation adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic The Fantastic Mr. Fox, has that certain something that makes it indisputably a Wes Anderson movie, as much as he tried to avoid it.

“My goal was to try to make it as Dahl as possible,” the director says.

But his touch is unmistakable — and with good reason, as Anderson felt a deep, personal connection to the story.  “This was the first book that I legally owned in our household that was my property,” he says. “I still have it, and it still has a little plate in it with my name from the school book fair.”

And in a more thematic sense, the titular Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) fits in well with Anderson’s stable of rascal father figures, from Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums to Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

“I’m drawn to characters like that,” Anderson says. “As a kid, I really liked the character of Mr. Fox because it wasn’t just that he rescued his family, but that he got them into trouble in the first place. Something about that, I feel like I responded to.”

Adapting the story for the screen was the easy part. What Anderson found difficult was adapting his own filmmaking style to the world of animation. “I wanted to shoot it the same way I would a live action movie, which, in the end becomes ... extremely challenging,”

Opening date
• The Fantastic Mr. Fox opens in movie theatres on Wednesday, Nov. 25.