Wes Anderson’s trajectory into animated features is anything if not logical. It’s fitting that his first foray into animation would also see his first explicit invocation of “existentialism” (to my recollection). “What’s it mean to be a fox, or to be an opossum?” George Clooney plaintively asks in the first 15 minutes of his film. If there’s anything I can promise to you about this film, it is that we will soon find out what it is like to be a fox who wonders what it’s like to be a fox.

Let’s get the animation out of the way: Anderson pulled a few members of the crew of “Wallace and Grommit: Curse of the Were-rabbit” and “Bob the Builder”, and, one assumes, trusted his own abilities to find him a way to make a successful animated feature. (Going by what his crew said about the production, I am obligated to congratulate Anderson for making a movie at all):

Reached by phone in Paris this summer, a day after production had wrapped, Anderson, 40, sounded taken aback when informed of his underlings’ grumbling. To hear it from the Houston native, a self-described “novice” in stop-motion, he ignored the majority viewpoint in pursuit of something specific: a cool-looking, detail-saturated, retro-leaning stop-motion movie. Even if that meant bucking conventional animation wisdom by avoiding the modern technology that pervades the genre these days.

“It’s not the most pleasant thing to force somebody to do it the way they don’t want to do it,” Anderson said. “In Tristan’s case, what I was telling him was, ‘You can’t use the techniques that you’ve learned to use. I’m going to make your life more difficult by demanding a certain approach.’

This film’s animation is best let lie, as the sleeping dog. It speaks to the amateurism which pervades the film that Anderson attempts to pass off the poor animation as one more instance of his overarching pursuit of a “retro” aesthetic which is best described by the look of no-doubt-utter disinterest on Owen Wilson’s face as he supplied his requisite few lines for the film.

All the usual suspects are present in this film, with a little bit of musical chairs. Bill Murray has been replaced by George Clooney as the assertive-to-the-point-of-offense male lead. Jason Schwartzman reprises his role as the self-pitying, too-much-of-a-pussy-to-be-prodigal son.

“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is not Anderson’s worst effort by any means. If anything, it draws his aesthetic and moral taste into sharper relief. “I’m grumpy, snappy, always get up on the wrong side of bed”, Ash (Schwartzman) says. “Sorry.” (He is speaking to his cousin, who is by all measures superior to Ash). “I guess this is what it means to be different.”

Wes Anderson’s popularity, at least to some significant extent can be traced to his early intuition that Generations X, Y, and Z (Everyone except the Boomers and, lest we forget, the Greatest Generation) are defined by their various neuroses and discontents. Above all there our inability to reconcile  our beliefs (that our unrecognized talents in music curation and ironic humor) with reality, namely that our fecklessness and self-pity is undeserved.

Things do not go our way, and neither do they for Fantastic Mr. Fox. Mr. Fox cannot ignore his Rousseauian tendency to pilfer chicken. He draws the ire of the farmers Bean, Boggis, and Bunce. It should be said now that nearly every clever and interesting turn of plot and writing can be traced to the Roald Dahl story upon which “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is based. Instead of complementing Dahl’s reliable british humor, Anderson’s irritating affinity for esoteric music and solipsistic existentialism (there exist other kinds, to my knowledge) puts a damper on the movie as a whole.  Every slip, slap, punch, gunfight, race, and other cause for laughter is spoiled by the “meaning” Anderson chooses to inject such moments with, choosing from a grabbag of about three tropes that should not be unfamiliar to someone who has seen any of his other films. Ash’s inability to accomplish anything well doesn’t even affect the kind of embarrassment one expects from comedies of self-consciousness. It is all overshadowed by Oedipus, Anderson’s interpretation of which is the most tepid and cloying since Luke Skywalker’s battle with Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back.

What’s worse than seeing a film like this? Knowing it’s the best we can do. As “millenials” we are left with nothing much else to do than play around in the ashes left by 20th century culture. Anderson’s problem is not so much his own as it is everyone’s: our paralyzing sense of irony has found a deadly catalyst in our self-appointed position as curators of 20th-century culture. “You are great lawyers, pediatricians, stenographers, and landscape artists,” Mr. Fox says in one of his many uninspiring “toasts”. “But you’re all wild animals.”

The sad thing is, I don’t think there is anything behind the facade of the lawyer, the pediatrician, the stenographer, and the landscape artist.