From tomorrow’s New York Times (article | slideshow):
FROM a young age Wes Anderson has felt proprietary about Roald Dahl’s classic children’s novel “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” “It was the first book at our household that was considered to be mine,” he said. “I was obsessed with anything involving hidden passageways or underground tunnels.”
Mr. Anderson’s live-action films have always existed in parallel realities — elaborately storyboarded, art-directed parallel realities, no less — and so it is not too great a leap for him to be conjuring a world from scratch for his stop-motion animated version of “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (opening Nov. 13).
Controversy flared recently when some crew members grumbled to The Los Angeles Times about Mr. Anderson’s absence from the film’s London set during the shoot. He has acknowledged that he did much of his work from Paris, where he has an apartment, sending detailed instructions, photos and videos to the animators. In any case, the finished film, which he wrote with the filmmaker Noah Baumbach, suggests that Mr. Anderson was anything but hands-off. This may be his first animated film, but his fingerprints are everywhere, from the dollhouse cross sections to the funny-sad family dynamics to the belief that production design is intimately linked with character.
