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Behind the scenes of Fantastic Mr. Fox

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Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox is stop-motion animation film based on the Roald Dahl children's book of the same name. Here is a behind-the-scenes look at how the film was made:

STOP-MOTION

First seen in Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton's 1898 film The Humpty Dumpty Circus, stop-motion animation is one of the oldest forms of special effects, and the meticulous, labor-intensive process hasn't changed much since its introduction more than a century ago. The technique involves the frame-by-frame manipulation of a three-dimensional object — a puppet, a model or even an actor — to bring it to life and make it appear to move. Typically there are 24 frames of film per second of screen time, and so the object's body, head, arms, legs, hands, fingers, eyes, ears, and mouth must be moved in infinitesimally small increments between frames, which, when the film is projected, creates the illusion of movement.

"I've always loved stop-motion," says director Wes Anderson, who had previously included several stop-motion sequences in his 2004 feature The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, sequences that were directed by stop-motion superstar Henry Selick (Coraline). "But the thing I've always loved with stop-motion, more than anything else, is puppets that have fur."

"One of the things Wes likes about stop-motion is that there's a magic to it," says producer Jeremy Dawson. "He likes that it's handmade, and there's a craft to it. He's not a big fan of computer imagery, per se, because he likes process. The aesthetic of stop-motion lets you use lots of textures and crafted little things, and all his movies are so designed and executed and every detail is thought out. So it's sort of a perfect medium in that case."

PUPPETS

Unlike most stop-motion puppets which are normally made from silicon or plasticine over a ball and socket armature, a large number of the characters in Fantastic Mr. Fox, by virtue of being animals, needed to be covered in fur.

As with props, every item of clothing for the puppets had to be manufactured to Anderson's precise instructions. The corduroy and tweed suits worn by Mr. Fox were based on suits that Anderson wears himself. "We got swatch samples from his tailor so we could match the color," Abbate reveals.

Mrs. Fox's dress took a little more time to get right. "Unlike most animated movies where you sketch the characters and the dress would be part of the sculpt, here Wes designed the clothes like you would for an actress or a model," recalls producer Allison Abbate. "But the first dress we made didn't look that great on her. It was fine as a drawing but it didn't work with the puppet's hips, shoulders and torso, and so the puppet costumers had to become like costume designers and go, how can we fit this dress on her? She's Meryl Streep after all. She needs something beautiful."

ANIMATION PROCESS

Principal photography on Fantastic Mr. Fox began on June 9, 2008 at Three Mills Studios in East London, a week later than planned after an unexploded Second World War bomb was discovered in a nearby river, forcing the studio and surrounding properties to be evacuated for several days.

Once all the puppets were completed, they were turned over to an international crew of 30 animators who then spent the next year making these puppets act, under the close guidance of Anderson, animation director Mark Gustafson and animation supervisor Mark Waring.

Anderson's desire for a rougher, choppier style of animation was somewhat easier to achieve. "You can animate a character 24 times to get a second's worth of animation but if you do it 12 times and do each frame twice, it'll only be 12 movements rather than 24," explains Waring of the process known as "twos" which was used for certain scenes. "It gives a slightly different style. It's not that noticeable, but it's slightly choppier."

In terms of animating Mr. Fox himself, Waring says character was key to his movements – that and thinking of him as human. "Mr. Fox is a bit of an antihero," explains Waring. "He's quite sly. He's not a good parent. He doesn't look after his son very well. Also he lies to his wife. When you come to animate, you have to have that in your mind, to try and express that inner emotion. You're trying to make the audience believe he's shifty, so he moves quickly. And when he's eating his breakfast there's the element of the wild animal still in him, so he goes crazy while eating. But most of it is played out as if they're humans rather than an animal look. That came through in the other characters as well, they became more human-based."

DIRECTING

Despite his insistence on old-fashioned techniques for shooting Fantastic Mr. Fox, it was modern technology that enabled Anderson to direct the film 24 hours a day from any location. "Doing this sort of movie, it's a long, long process and it's very detail-oriented," he reflects. "There are a million decisions, more than a live-action movie, because everything has to be made. People are making decisions not in a moment-to-moment basis but in a frame-to-frame basis and everything is just more intricate. And so half of the process of making the movie was figuring out how to make the movie, and how to manage all this information and to make sure we get onto the screen what we want to get on there, because there are 29 units going at once. That's insane. I'm accustomed to one and that's usually completely overwhelming. But we had such a great group of people and we figured out a way."

"We devised a systems of emails and sending frames and even live feeds from the animation stages to wherever he was in the world," says Abbate, "so that he could really just focus on any given stage and not be distracted by all the other activity going on. It's overwhelming having 29 or 30 ‘first unit' set ups and by distilling the information and getting him any reference he needed, we were able to get focused decisions on every phase of every shot."

The result is a stop-motion film that looks and feels very unique and different and yet which also stands stylistically and thematically alongside Anderson's other films. "The same tactics and storytelling tricks and tools he uses in live-action, I think he's done with animation," says Abbate. "The interesting thing is it's never done in animation and that is what makes it exciting. It feels different. Most animated films use close-ups to read the characters emotions, but Wes likes to play it from a little bit further back.  It's their body language and choreography that tells you what you are supposed to think about the shot. For an animated movie that is a departure, and I think it is an interesting one."

Felicity Dahl, Roald Dahl's widow and manager of the late author's literary estate, believes that Roald would most definitely have approved. "When I was watching the finished film, I thought, He'd love this," she says. "I could feel him smiling. My breath was taken away, I have to say, when I came out of the screening. I immediately emailed Wes and I said, ‘This is a masterpiece,' it's fantastic and the pace, the music. I couldn't get over the wit in it, but also the beauty. The visual side of the film is just breathtaking."