Foxy and fantastic

Look at this star-studded line-up!

GEORGE CLOONEY as MR. FOX
MERYL STREEP as MRS. FOX
JASON SCHWARTZMAN as ASH
BILL MURRAY as BADGER
WALLY WOLODARSKY as KYLIE
ERIC ANDERSON as KRISTOFFERSON
MICHAEL GAMBON as FRANKLIN BEAN
WILLEM DAFOE as RAT
OWEN WILSON as COACH SKIP
JARVIS COCKER as PETEY

I’m a fan of George Clooney. I’m a fan of Wes Anderson. I’m a fan of stop-motion. Hence I was certain to see Fantastic Mr Fox. I’m happy to add I’m now a fan of this film too.

I’ve never been overly into Wallis and Gromit so it’s easy for me to say this movie is the best example of stop-motion animation in a feature length film there is to date. The animation is impeccable. I love the way materials are used to depict various elements; for example, the stylised water and steam are fantastic.

The story, based on Roald Dahl’s classic, is interesting and each character has his or her own qualities and shortcomings that add real depth to each.

While this is by no means the best film I’ve seen this year it really does deserve your attention if you’re after a night of entertainment or a fail safe bet for a great date movie.

By Miles Langley

Thread star rating 9/10
 
Fantastic Mr Fox Fun Facts

We shot the movie entirely in a studio in London, England and it took 2 years to complete.

The film is an adaptation of the beloved children’s book by Roald Dahl. Wes was very inspired by Dahl and even wrote much of the screenplay while visiting Dahl’s home in the small town of Great Missenden. Because of this, many of the sets and characters were based on places and people we all saw in this area.

Mr Fox’s study is based on Dahl’s writing room. Bean’s house is based on Dahl’s house. Even Mr Fox’s tree home is based on a famous tree that grew on Dahl’s property.

In order to make the voice performances feel like they were taking place in real outdoor settings, Wes brought George Clooney, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman and a few others out to a real working farm and recorded them in actual barns, fields and chicken coops!

We had 24 animators who shot for 52 weeks. On average, animators usually will shoot 12 – 24 different frames for every second of footage in the film. The film is 86 minutes long so that would be 5160 seconds and 61,920 different posed frames in the film.

The longest shot in the movie is 77 seconds (or 1878 frames) features 20 different characters and was scheduled to take 6 weeks to shoot. Smartly we assigned it to our fantastic Animation supervisor, Mark Waring, and he did it in just 21 days.

Because we make these kinds of movies one frame at a time, we actually shot the film on digital still cameras not unlike the kind you have at home and then we string all the different frames together and made the movie.

At the height of production we had 34 cameras and 34 different stages for sets.

Puppet Facts

We had a total of 535 puppets in 6 scales. The largest puppet was 2 feet (Rat puppet was the largest) and the smallest puppet (micro scale Ash) was only 1/4 of an inch tall.

The largest Mr Fox puppet is 15 inches tall.

Because Mr Fox appeared in so many scenes, we had to build more than one puppet. In fact, there were 14 full scale Mr Fox, 4 half scale and over 20 micro scale Mr Foxes.

Since we were working with furry puppets on this film, it took a lot of time to figure out the best way to make them. In fact the first Mr Fox took 302,400 minutes to create. But after two years of making and repairing these puppets, the team got that time down by quite a bit. The last Mr Fox took only 12,480 minutes.

Each full-scale puppet has over 15 joints and moving parts that make up its skeleton.

There were 285 costumes in 4 scales, which ranged from the tiny hat for half scale Bunce to the giant Mr Fox coat for the radio close up.

All the costumes were made by hand and tailored to fit the characters like you would any actor or model. Even the tiny stitching on Rat’s “Bean Security” tag was embroidered by hand.

ART DEPARTMENT FACTS

We built over 150 different sets. Over 4000 different props were designed, drawn and constructed for the film.

The supermarket alone had around 2000 miniature products that all had individually designed labels, which needed to be applied by hand.

We used over 200 dyed bath towels to make all of the grass in the movie.

It took 2 painters and 3 interns 4 weeks to paint all of the bricks that were used to make the sewer sets. Luckily the sewer bricks were all made from carved Styrofoam and are actually very light!

The smallest leaves on Mr Fox’s tree home were actually made from recycled tea leaves, so every time someone stopped for a tea break, we got more tiny tea leaves. Nothing ever went to waste.

The waterfall in the sewer was really a huge wall of regular, every day, kitchen grade, saran wrap. But we needed to cover over eight feet of it. We used 30 rolls of saran wrap and wrapped them around two rods and then rolled them in front of the camera one frame at a time so it looked like falling water.

Bunce swimming pool didn’t actually have any water in it either. This effect of water reflections was achieved by shining a light through two sheets of bumpy glass. We then rigged a strip of Plexiglas, which was twisted one frame at a time to simulate the undulating surface of the water. They then put some more crinkled up saran wrap on top to make the splashes and had an instant bobbing water line.

All of our smoke and explosions were made from painted cotton balls and our fire and flames were made from glycerin soap.

Bonus fun fact

We were making headlines before we even began. On the first day of shooting, the city of London discovered the largest unexploded WWII bomb ever found in the city, directly underneath our production studio. We had to be evacuated for 5 days before the Royal bomb squad was able to render it harmless. Luckily no puppets (or people) were harmed in the exercise and everyone got a little vacation before all the hard work could begin again in week 2.