The Fantastic Mr. Fox Animates Hong Kong Fantastically

March 25, 2010

Celebrate the Year of the Tiger with a Fox.

It’s good to see more stop-motion animated movies in the cinemas again. Last year’s Coraline was a marvel to look at, but if little girls with button eyes didn’t do it for you, George Clooney thinks his Fantastic Mr. Fox may be more to your liking, which opens in Hong Kong on March 25, 2010.

Based on the book by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Roald Dahl, this version directed by Wes Anderson featuring the voices of Clooney, Meryl Streep, Owen Wilson and Bill Murray has been 2 years in the making. The interesting thing about this production is that all the voices were recorded outside instead of in a studio giving them a more spontaneous and alive feeling than maybe a more still performance you’d get inside a small sound booth.

Fantastic Mr. Fox came out in November in the US and has garnered a lot of great reviews and it recently was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film at the Golden Globes but lost to Pixar’s Up – but has 2 Academy Award nominations – and thanks to that we get a theatrical release for this film in Hong Kong.

The trailer and more information on the stop motion technique is below.

Below is a chunk of text from the movie company about the animation process which we found very interesting and wanted to share with you:

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.

For the animators working on FANTASTIC MR. FOX, many of them veterans of CORPSE BRIDE and CORALINE, the biggest challenge was the material that covered the majority of the puppets. “It’s a furry film,” says director of photography Tristan Oliver with only a modicum of understatement. “That gives a whole new range of problems because fur doesn’t really behave itself in stop-frame — it flutters and jitters.”

That jittery movement is referred to as the “boil” by animators. But rather than try to eradicate the effect — which would have been time-consuming and difficult, although not impossible — Anderson was keen to embrace the imperfection. Yet another influence of stop-motion animated films such as PETER AND THE WOLF, LE ROMAN DE RENARD and the original KING KONG, the latter a particular favorite of the filmmaker’s. “I remember loving the original KING KONG and seeing the way the fur moves,” Anderson insists. “The fur just kind of ripples along all of them, and I always liked that, I don’t know why.”

Working out the best way for the fur to “boil”, but not so much that it became distracting, was trial and error. “We found if you didn’t move the fur, it froze and looked a bit odd,” reveals animation supervisor Waring. In the end, trying not to move the fur was the key. “By being careful, and using cocktail sticks and sculpting tools and very minimal contact with the fur, [that] gave enough movement to it. Or else you’d blow on it or just touch it slightly, every now and again. The puppet department also put hair products into the fur, gels and hairspray, to try and stabilize it, so you could style it and tease it to get the look you wanted.”

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.”

Another major challenge faced by the animators was Anderson’s insistence that the puppets shouldn’t blink, a decision that, at first, caused some anxiety. “For keeping a puppet alive, the eyes are a fantastic thing,” says Gent. “You can have a puppet stand still but if its eyes blink every now and then, that’s a very good way of keeping everybody glued to it. Not blinking changes that dynamic for obvious reasons but we were able to do special sets of eyeballs for the hero scale puppets when we went in for close ups. We spent a lot of time finessing the irises to get that richness of light and to give them as much of a watery, realistic look as possible.”

Part of Anderson’s desire to avoid puppets blinking was to do with his aesthetic approach to FANTASTIC MR. FOX. Unlike traditional stop-motion movies with their sweeping camera moves and multitude of close-ups, Anderson decided to shoot FANTASTIC MR. FOX as he would one of his live-action films. And so, the animators were schooled in the ways of Anderson, watching his previous movies as research to pick up tips about his use of very formal framing; his fondness for symmetry within the frame and for characters to be in the centre frame and often talking directly to camera; his playing out of scenes in mostly masters; and his use of long, slow tracking shoots – as well as how he worked with his actors.

“There are a lot of decisions that are definitely molded by his live-action background,” says animation director Mark Gustafson. “He likes to play master shots. In close ups, he wants very little going on. When he does do a close up, he’ll do a very tight close up and he doesn’t want blinking and it’s really a challenge because with an actor like Bill Murray there’s a whole lot going on in the face, there’s not much movement but there’s all kinds of soul. You get in on a puppet and it’s not there unless you find a way to put it there, and the best animators can make a really tight close up work on a puppet that has got a layer of fur on top of this latex or silicon, and these mechanics inside that you’re just shoving around with your thumb. The best of the shots I look at and go, ‘Wow, how in the world did that animator manage to get that out of a tiny little area, with fingers and thumbs and sticks?’”

One particular tracking shot, lasting a minute-and-a-half of screen time, was so complicated it took Waring, from preparation to shooting, more than three months to finish and involved around nine weeks of actual animation.

“It was quite an involved thing which involved nearly all the characters at some point in the shot,” he reveals. “It started with Mole playing the piano, went through across the flint mine table where they’re preparing for the banquet, so all the characters are laying the table and some are talking, we end up in the kitchen with all the kitchen melee going on and Rabbit chopping up and directing people cooking, and then continue from there to Badger and Fox walking and talking as we track along with them, and then we end up at the punchbowl where there’s a whole conversation with Ash, Kristofferson and Agnes that lasts for about 45 seconds with them taking punch out of the bowl.”

Waring split the sequence into three sections although it was one continuous shot. “It’s the longest shot in the movie and the most complicated in terms of the amount of characters and the geography of where they are and the continuity and amount of dialogue,” he notes. “I started at the end of October and finished it in February, although we stopped for the Christmas break.”

While working with “hero scale” and “half scale” puppets was par for the course for the film’s animators, the “micro-mini” puppets were a different proposition entirely. Small and fiddly, they required tweezers to move them and a different mindset to animate them.

“They were mainly used for broader strokes, so you would give the essence of something rather than the detail,” Waring explains. “We used them mainly for the running around and the broader action which they were really good for, because you could put them on rigs or pin them. Because they had wire legs you could bend them into more extreme poses that suited bigger runs or leaps. But Wes really liked them, so eventually they were brought further forward into the frame, and we ended up using them quite close to camera for some of the sequences, which again provided a slightly different look.”

“It was about finding the clever, old-fashioned way of solving a problem, so you weren’t having to do big VFX fixes at the end or big VFX tasks. We still used rigs and rig removal, but we use visual effects to clean up the stuff that we do, not necessarily to make the shots,” explains producer Abbate.

And so the animators went back to using what were considered to be traditional methods for creating flames and water and smoke as actual elements in camera, relying on cellophane for water, glycerine soap that was carved and sculpted into flames, and even cotton wool for smoke.

“Typically what we would do would be shoot live action elements, like live action smoke and comp them in,” says director of photography Tristan Oliver. “That’s not CG, that’s comping, but Wes was opposed to that. We’ve also used a lot of pepper’s ghost, an old theatre trick using a half-silvered mirror in front of the camera on which you can project an image that the camera sees as well as the scene beyond. So, for placing flames in difficult to get at areas, you can animate the flames off set, and they reflect in the glass into the appropriate part of the set.”