40 Greatest Animated Movies Ever - Rolling Stone
From Pixar landmarks to cyberpunk anime, Disney princess flicks to 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' — the 40 greatest animated movies of all time.
recalled in 2009
“I always loved Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Wes Anderson <anchor>recalled in 2009</anchor> about the Roald Dahl novel that inspired his greatest film. “It was the first book I actually owned with my name written in the title page on a little sticker.” That kind of loving, handmade detail is all over the filmmaker’s adaptation, a gloriously tactile rendering of the Fox family and its hopelessly restless patriarch, whose fear of mortality drives him to return to his old criminal lifestyle. All Anderson films are tributes to their own meticulous design and dry wit, but Fox‘s stop-motion style adds a graceful fragility to the director’s ethos, and his voice cast (including George Clooney and Meryl Streep) gives decidedly grown-up, anti-cute performances. It’s a beloved cult item, as well as a holiday staple for discriminating families — ones who will no doubt see part of themselves reflected back in the movie’s very “different” menagerie of critters. TG
Wes Anderson interview for Fantastic Mr Fox
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# Wes Anderson interview for Fantastic Mr Fox

After a long chase, Fantastic Mr Fox has finally been captured. Offbeat film director Wes Anderson brought Roald Dahl's children's classic to life.

ByCraig Mclean 20 October 2009 • 5:50pm

In the dark recesses of Three Mills - once a canalside industrial site in east London, now a warren of film studios - a fox (who sounds like George Clooney) and a rat (with the voice of Willem Dafoe) are fighting. Sparks from an electricity substation illuminate the rat's knife and the fox's lack of tail. A few feet away, tiny woodland creatures controlled by thin metal skewers are being flushed through sewers, a torrent of homebrewed cider spinning a mouse, badger and opossum head over heels. Meanwhile, around a curtained-off corner, a farmer named Bean is stomping around outside a caravan and kicking a barrel, his rage alarming a farmhand fixing his bike. The farmhand resembles Jarvis Cocker. As for Bean, he looks a little like Roald Dahl. This is the miniature, incredibly detailed world of Fantastic Mr Fox, Wes Anderson's stop-motion animation of Dahl's 1970 classic about a wily Vulpes vulpes and his battles with three poultry-owning, cider-brewing farmers.

It is spring 2009, and a puppet department of 20-plus craftsmen and women (with more based at the Altrincham headquarters of the master puppeteers Mackinnon & Saunders, where many of the models originated) have been labouring, alongside some of the world's best animators, for over two years on 500 figures in six different scales, crafted to Anderson's exacting specifications.

Stop-motion is a precise, labour-intensive form of animation: put simply, puppets are photographed, moved incrementally, then photographed again. Thousands of these images are built up to create 'action'. For Anderson, a director renowned for minute and often off-kilter detail - of dialogue, costuming, music and mood - in films such as Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, this technique allowed him to create his own bespoke world: not liveaction, not cartoon, but somewhere in between. Something unreal but at the same-time pure and handmade. 'Some of the filmmakers who have inspired me the most are ones whose movies are a bit dreamlike or not like any particular world, like Fellini,' he says. 'And I love Buñuel - he just seems to do whatever he wants, from scene to scene. And that's very appealing to me.'

Not that Anderson has taken a surrealist scalpel to Dahl's book. He is faithful to the central storyline: the battle of wits between Mr Fox and the farmers - 'Boggis and Bunce and Bean,' as the book's signature verse puts it, 'one short, one fat, one lean, these horrible crooks, so different in looks, were none the less equally mean.' Tired of the fox raiding their cages, coops and storehouses, the farmers resort to increasingly desperate - and brutal - measures to capture and kill him, eventually imperilling the existence of all the creatures in the woods. But Anderson, in collaboration with his friend and fellow New York-based writer/director Noah Baumbach, has scripted new characters and dimensions to Dahl'story. Mr Fox now has an overachieving nephew, Kristofferson (voiced by Anderson's younger brother Eric), and is the champion of a hugely complex school field sport invented by Anderson, Whack-Bat - a sport with climactic relevance to the plot. We know he is champion because we can see, in a blink-andyou'll- miss-it detail, the school trophy awarded to 'PS II Co-Ed All Species Most Valuable Player of the Fox Year'. A 'FF Fox' has achieved this accolade seven times, while 'JJ Raccoon' and 'HK Silvery Marmoset' managed only one year apiece.

To the film's technical teams, the devil was in such devilishly small details. For banjo-playing Petey, another new character and the one modelled on Cocker (a friend of Anderson's who wrote the music for the song Petey sings in the film), the team studied video footage of the singer performing. Petey's movements demanded an especially dexterous puppet, and the technicians made their own ball-socket joints, using Swiss watch bolts. Farmer Bean (voiced by Michael Gambon and, in his physical appearance, partly based on Dahl) required 15 coats of paint to achieve the specific skin pallor Anderson had in mind. The animals' skulls were modelled from Plasticine, fibreglass and silver; their exteriors were painstakingly fashioned from repurposed fur, goat hide and kangaroo skin from koala puppets sourced from Australia. The stripy jumper worn by Rat, the guardian of Farmer Bean's cider cellar (whom Dafoe gives the accent of a New Orleans gangster), was knitted - but first the team had to whittle tiny knitting needles. Furthermore, these models had to be rigorous enough to withstand the micro-movements repeatedly wrought upon them by animators working to create - in the case of a big fight scene involving flaming pine cones (grey cotton wool for smoke; carved flakes of Pears soap for flames) - six seconds of footage in two days. The large-scale 'hero' versions of the key characters - for close-up shots - can, the models supervisor Andy Gent says, 'do everything; their lips can move to make phonetic shapes.'

All told, there have been 15 versions of Mr Fox, from a 'young look' early in the film - bushy tail, no scars on cheek, no grey on temple, two sprightly ears of corn in his left breast pocket - to the more battered, tail-less hero who, towards the film's end, has survived various bruising tussles with the gun-wielding, bulldozer-driving farmers. His costume, though, is always the same. It is a tight-fitting corduroy suit - 'fabric from one of my suits,' says Anderson, a dandyish 40-year-old who, in his own younger days, favoured suits purposefully tailored two sizes too small ('I still wear them pretty snug'). 'Mr Fox's suit is made of orange-ish, brown-ish corduroy. It looks like the colour of a leaf in autumn, and we wanted the whole movie to look like the fall.' 'Wes wanted it to be as real as possible in a stylish way, and not just an atmospheric reality,' says Jeremy Dawson, the executive producer and a longstanding collaborator with Anderson. 'His liveaction films are not totally real either. You could look at this film and say it's definitely a Wes film.' Indeed, Fantastic Mr Fox is of a piece with Rushmore (1998), which starred Jason Schwartzman as a schoolboy genius;

The Royal Tenenbaums, his bleakly hilarious portrayal of an eccentric family, with Gwyneth Paltrow playing a kohl-eyed, sexually adventurous depressive and Ben Stiller a widower ever-paranoid about his sons' safety; and his 2007 film The Darjeeling Limited, in which squabbling brothers travel around India by train. The 'actors' are also familiar: Bill Murray (Mr Badger) and Owen Wilson (Coach Skip) are Anderson regulars. 'On all his films he's very specific about detail,' Dawson says. 'He likes to sculpt everything.' On Fantastic Mr Fox this has had to be achieved on a budget of '$20 to $30 million', which, Dawson says, is half that of a Wallace & Gromit feature, or of this year's other big-screen stop-motion film, Henry Selick's Coraline. Allison Abbate, the film's producer, guiding me around the dark interiors of Three Mills, says that simultaneously running 30-plus miniature sets - fox den, farmhouse, chicken coop, town square, sewer, supermarket - has meant 'many fires to put out, a lot of multi-tasking and juggling. We've done a great job of painting the Sistine Chapel on the head of a pin.' It may have been more than two gruelling years in the actual shooting, but transporting Anderson's vision of Fantastic Mr Fox from page to screen has been a much longer undertaking. 'I always loved Fantastic Mr Fox - it was the first book I actually owned with my name written in the title page on a little sticker,' he says when we meet in London a few months after my visit to the Three Mills set. Born in Texas, he mainly lives in New York, but he spends a lot of time in Paris.

'As a child I loved the character of Mr Fox. The combination of his being heroic and also vain. That character was very appealing to me and my brothers, who I was reading the book with.' 'I never questioned the book's importance to Wes, because I understood its importance to me,' says Eric Anderson, with whom Wes often creates pre-shooting storyboards. 'Mr Fox had a wit and urbanity and sophistication that made him seem unique among the heroes of kids' books.' Two decades on, word of Anderson's enthusiasm reached Felicity 'Liccy' Dahl, Roald Dahl's widow. 'About nine years ago my film agent, Michael Siegel in Los Angeles, rang me and said, "There's somebody who keeps knocking at the door for Fantastic Mr Fox,"' she recalls. 'I said, "Do you think we can really make a film of that?"' Although successful adaptations had already been made of Dahl's books Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches, James and the Giant Peach and Matilda, Siegel cautioned that Dahl refrain from meeting Anderson just yet - his films, lauded for their quirky characterisation, ironic touches, pop-surrealist plots and hip soundtracks, might not be to her taste.

First of all, the agent sent her copies of Anderson's 1996 breakthrough, Bottle Rocket, and Rushmore. 'I looked at them,' Dahl remembers, 'and thought, "Blimey, here's somebody with a bit of talent."' Liccy Dahl and Anderson eventually met in New York, just as Anderson was preparing to start on 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums. Dahl was charmed by him, and persuaded of his passion for, and understanding of, her husband's work. But it would take another two films (The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited) before Anderson could set to work in earnest on Fantastic Mr Fox. Even then, Dahl had concerns, not least when he told her that he wanted to make the film in stop-motion. 'There were two risks involved with Wes,' she says. 'And they were risks - people thought I was a bit mad, I think. The number one risk was, this is a children's book - would it become too adult? And number two was, Wes had never done stop-motion, and that was a big break for him. He had done a little in Aquatic…' Anderson's film about a Jacques Cousteau-like adventurer did feature a stop-motion underwater interlude, made with the help of Henry Selick, the renowned animator-director of The Nightmare Before Christmas whom Dahl knew from his having directed James and the Giant Peach. Indeed, Selick was part of the initial team assembled to make Fantastic Mr Fox. But then Coraline was greenlit and he left Anderson's project.

Ultimately, Dahl says, 'I just had such faith in Wes. I thought, "No, he wouldn't be doing this [stop-motion] if he wasn't pretty certain."' She was further reassured when Anderson said that he would like to stay with her at Gipsy House, the Dahl family home in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. He and Baumbach wanted to write their script there, the better to imbibe the spirit of the author's world. Anderson was also determined to honour Dahl's creative environment by setting his film at Gipsy House and in the surrounding countryside. Thus Roald Dahl's 'writing hut' was recreated, in puppet-friendly miniature, as Mr Fox's study, and the Nag's Head pub in Great Missenden features in the film's town square. Anderson sent a researcher to photograph every nook and cranny of Gipsy House, and took Polaroids of locals so he had real-life models on whom to base the farmhand characters. Equally, Anderson, renowned for his whipsmart dialogue, had high aspirations for his talking puppets. 'Wes wanted to try as hard as possible to get the actors together in one room instead of recording their voices separately in the studio then knit them together in post-production,' says Jason Schwartzman, who supplies the voice of Ash, Mr Fox's son. 'I love animated movies but I knew what he was talking about - sometimes there can be a lack of togetherness; they're recorded very cleanly. Wes wanted a real sense of connection, have the characters overlapping each other and not have it done so precisely.'

To that end Anderson organised a recording session on a farm in Connecticut - what Allison Abbate calls 'a radio play of the movie that we cut to the storyboards'. Meryl Streep (Mrs Fox) couldn't make it, but the other principals, led by Clooney, found themselves, Schwartzman says, 'running around outside with a guy following us with a boom mike. When you see my character digging through dirt in the movie, I'm really doing that. That was so much fun.' But while this made for a certain authenticity, it also adds up to a feature of the film that Dahl purists may find inauthentic: all the animals in this most English of stories are American. Why? 'We wrote it in our own way and our own voice, and we were writing what we thought was funnier dialogue for American accents,' Anderson says. 'Then at a certain point we decided we'd say it was set in England but the humans will be British and the animals - well, animals don't talk anyway so we can give them any accent we want.' It's a very Anderson-like reasoning. There's a similar singularity behind the whole look and feel of his film. Rather than the seamless polish of Coraline or The Wrong Trousers, Anderson was pursuing a more homespun, see-the-joins vision - that of the original 1930s King Kong, or the work of the stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen.

'Often techniques that people would want to use nowadays are techniques that make things smoother and more convincing - the water in our movie is made from clingfilm,' Anderson notes approvingly. He admits that this approach meant he occasionally butted heads with his technical team. Well-versed in the evolution of animation to the point where it can feel lifelike, they initially wanted to use the latest digital innovations. Anderson wanted a film that felt purposefully old-fashioned and handmade. 'I didn't want it so much to be more realistic,' he states. 'I wanted it to be more ours.' In that regard Anderson has succeeded handsomely. Fantastic Mr Fox is beautiful to look at, an imaginatively realised expansion of Dahl's book. The pace, detail and lightning-fast dialogue may occasionally fox the sensibilities of some younger viewers. But such is the depth and vigour of Anderson's lovingly and laboriously crafted world that the film will reward repeated viewings.

'It's Dahl's vision, fed through Wes's aesthetic,' the animation director Marc Gustafson says. 'That makes for something fairly unique.' As Liccy Dahl, a frequent visitor to the Three Mills set, acknowledges, 'Wes is a hard taskmaster. When you work with somebody who's really, really good, they generally do drive you mad. But it's worth it. I think Roald would have loved it. I can hear him quietly laughing as we watched it. We've had two full screenings now with various members of the family, and there's a very wide range of ages in the family, and they've all loved it. One of my grandsons, who's 13, hit the nail on the head: somebody asked him, "Do you think children will like this?" And he turned round and said, "Well, they'll be pretty boring if they don't."' A very Dahl response.

- 'Fantastic Mr Fox' is released on October 23.

- The book 'Fantastic Mr Fox: The Making of the Motion Picture' by Wes Anderson (Rizzoli) is available from Telegraph Books for £20.50 plus £1.25 p&p (0844-871 1515; books.telegraph.co.uk)

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