I love it when the Behind-the-Scenes material focuses on the artists and technology behind an animated film, as opposed to the voice cast. Actors are critical, but their involvement is minimal compared to the animators and craftsman toiling on the project for years and years.
Here’s a new featurette for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox which does just that. We meet producer Jeremy Dawson (The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou) and animation supervisor Mark Waring (Corpse Bride) who detail the “the Fishcat Method,” developed by Fish and Matthew Kitcat (Chicken Run). The system allowed director Anderson to approve the framing of a shot from anywhere in the world. Fantastic Mr. Fox is in theaters on November 25, 2009.
This new trailer for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox introduces us to the evil farmers, and illustrates the quirky relationship between Mr. Fox (George Clooney) and Badger (Bill Murray). This stop-motion feature hits theaters on November 25th.
In this new featurette about the upcoming stop-motion The Fantastic Mr. Fox film, we meet Felicity Dahl, the wife of the late Roald Dahl, author of the source material. Its also proposed that the lead character in the book and film, Mr. Fox, is cut from Roald’s own cloth. The film is in theaters November 25th.
The season of animation is upon us. The hotly-anticipated new feature 9, not to be confused with the upcoming musical Nine nor the German negative “Nein!” arrived yesterday in theaters on 9/9/09, making it the most numerologically apt release date since the June 6, 2006 unleashing of the Omen remake.
And after 9, the deluge. From now until the end of the year we’ll be seeing an unprecedented avalanche of animation hitting mainstream American cinemas, and one that demonstrates just how many formats can huddle in under the medium’s single umbrella. We’ll see a not-so-classic adaptation of a much-adapted classic, an eagerly awaited return to form, the ambitious realization of a long-gestated original vision, and a live-action auteur’s first foray into animation, among many others, brought to us via CGI, stop-motion, traditional hand-drawn cel, and the latest performance-capture technology. It’s a good time for animation fans.
9
Focus Features and Starz Animation
September 9
In between putting finishing touches on orcs and trolls for the Lord of the Rings at Peter Jackson’s famed Weta Workshop, Shane Acker worked for over four years on a short film that would eventually be nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. Now, another four years later, his meticulously imagined world of ragdoll protagonists, apocalyptic malaise and an entire mechanical ecosystem of things that go bump in the night, is coming to the big screen. 9 is produced by Tim Burton, a man who also likes his fairy tales on the darker side, and Timur Bekmambetov of Wanted fame, and features the voices of Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer and John C. Reilly. Expanding on the mythology established in the 11-minute short and giving vocal cords to the once silent characters, Acker follows nine sentient dolls as they try to unravel their own existence as well as the terrible fate that has befallen humanity, both of which might be tied together in what Acker has dubbed “a Geppetto/Oppenheimer figure.”
Expect the film to be dark and genuinely scary. I had the opportunity to speak with Acker a number of months ago and he emphasized his desire to lend the film a genuine aura of fear and peril: “What I’m trying to evoke here is fairy tales, the real ones. They were moral tales and there needed to be severe consequences to teach those lessons. (In) some of these animated films nowadays, you don’t feel like there are any stakes. It’s set up so much as a series of gags. You don’t really feel the nature of the threat. But I tried to make that threat present in 9.” The TV ads have warned that 9 is “definitely not your little brother’s animated movie,” which sucks for my little brother, because he, like myself, thinks it looks totally badass.
The third and final (????) release date for Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox has been set at November 25th, after flirting with November 6th and 13th respectively. This might be a vote of confidence for the film, as that’s the mighty Thanksgiving weekend here in the US.
Below is a behind-the-scenes featurette hosted by castmember Jason Schwartzman, which illustrates the incredibly time-consuming process of making a stop-motion feature film. What I found particularly interesting is how the team recorded audio in an environment similar to the setting portrayed in each scene.
Roald Dahl’s 1970 book Fantastic Mr. Fox is being turned into a stop-motion animated feature by a most unlikely director – Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums). And today the first trailer emerged. And yes, we also think it’s confusing that a movie named Fantastic Mr. Fox is being produced at 20th Century Fox Animation. The film arrives in theaters on November 13, 2009.
I love it when the Behind-the-Scenes material focuses on the artists and technology behind an animated film, as opposed to the voice cast. Actors are critical, but their involvement is minimal compared to the animators and craftsman toiling on the project for years and years. 
In between putting finishing touches on orcs and trolls for the Lord of the Rings at Peter Jackson’s famed Weta Workshop, 
