Fantastic Mr. Fox

A fox rallies his animal friends against three evil farmers. Running Time: 88 minutes PG Parental Guidance Suggested

Animated, Adventure, Comedy

Synopsis
After three nefarious farmers declare war on them, a sly fox (George Clooney) rallies his animal neighbors to fight back.

Cast: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Wally Wolodarsky, Eric Anderson, Michael Gambon, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson, Jarvis Cocker, Wes Anderson, Karen Duffy, Robin Hurlstone, Hugo Guinness, Helen McCrory, Roman Coppola, Juman Malouf, Jeremy Dawson, Garth Jennings

Producer(s): American Empirical

Crew: Director - Wes Anderson, Screenwriter - Wes Anderson, Screenwriter - Noah Baumbach, Producer - Wes Anderson, Producer - Scott Rudin, Producer - Allison Abbate, Producer - Jeremy Dawson, Executive Producer - Steven Rales, Executive Producer - Arnon Milchan, Animation Director - Mark Gustafson, Cinematographer - Tristan Oliver, Production Design - Nelson Lowry, Original Music - Alexandre Desplat, Supervising Editor - Andrew Weisblum


Distributor: 20th Century Fox

Release Date: 11/13/2009
Running Time: 88 minutes
OFFICIAL SITE

PG	Parental Guidance Suggested

Production Notes: - Notes provided by Fox Searchlight.-



FANTASTIC MR. FOX is visionary director Wes Anderson's first animated film, utilizing classic handmade stop-motion techniques to tell the story of the best-selling children's book by Roald Dahl (author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach). The film features the voices of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Wally Wolodarsky, Eric Anderson, Michael Gambon, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson, and Jarvis Cocker.



Mr. and Mrs. Fox (Clooney and Streep) live an idyllic home life with their son Ash (Schwartzman) and visiting young nephew Kristofferson (Eric Anderson). But after twelve years of quiet domesticity, the bucolic existence proves too much for Mr. Fox's wild animal instincts. Soon he slips back into his old ways as a sneaky chicken thief and in doing so, endangers not only his beloved family, but the whole animal community. Trapped underground without enough food to go around, the animals band together to fight against the evil Farmers - Boggis, Bunce and Bean - who are determined to capture the audacious, fantastic Mr. Fox at any cost. In the end, he uses his natural instincts to save his family and friends.



Twentieth Century Fox presents, in association with Indian Paintbrush and Regency Enterprises, an American Empirical Picture, FANTASTIC MR. FOX. Directed by Wes Anderson and written for the screen by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, the film is based on the book by Roald Dahl. The film is produced by Allison Abbate, Scott Rudin, Wes Anderson and Jeremy Dawson with Steven Rales and Arnon Milchan as executive producers.



The production team includes animation director Mark Gustafson, director of photography Tristan Oliver, production designer Nelson Lowry, music composed and conducted by Alexandre Desplat, supervising editor Andrew Weisblum, music supervisor Randall Poster and puppets fabricated by MacKinnon and Saunders.



ORIGINS



First published in 1970 by Alfred Knopf in the US and George Allen & Unwin in the UK, with illustrations by Donald Chaffin, Roald Dahl's beloved book Fantastic Mr. Fox has enchanted and delighted generations of children and their parents alike for almost 40 years. Now, thanks to the bittersweet, wryly funny vision of acclaimed filmmaker Wes Anderson (RUSHMORE, THE ROYAL TENNENBAUMS, THE DARJEELING LIMITED) and the magic of stop-motion animation, Dahl's darkly humorous tale of the noble, charming and fantastic Mr. Fox is set to enthrall and delight an even wider audience.



Anderson first read Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox as a child growing up in Houston, Texas and was captivated by it. "It was not only the first Roald Dahl book I ever read, it was the first book I ever owned," he says. "I loved the character of Mr. Fox, this sort of heroic and slightly vain animal. And I also loved the digging. My brothers and I were obsessed with being underground and with tunnels and forts. He's a wonderful writer and his personality comes through in the writing so forcefully."



Although Roald Dahl died in 1990, his work remains as influential and popular as ever, with many of his celebrated children's books having been adapted for the big screen, among them Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (which was the source of both the 1972 feature, WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, and the 2005 film starring Johnny Depp), James And The Giant Peach, Matilda, and The Witches, with several others in various stages of development.



Anderson optioned the movie rights to Fantastic Mr. Fox from Dahl's widow Felicity "Liccy" Dahl, who runs the late author's literary estate. "My film agent in Los Angeles approached me nine years ago, saying, 'I've had an enquiry from somebody called Wes Anderson, who wants to make a film of Fantastic Mr. Fox'," Dahl recalls. "In my ignorance, I hadn't heard of Wes Anderson then and he'd just made RUSHMORE and BOTTLE ROCKET. Michael sent me the videos and I looked at them and I thought, this guy has got talent. He was very young then and it wasn't until about three years later that we met in New York. He asked me to have lunch with him. He took me to a very posh restaurant and he was sitting, waiting for me when I walked in, and he stood up and he immediately looked like Mr. Fox, beautifully dressed, immaculate, and I said 'Gosh, Wes, what are we doing here?' And he said the cheese soufflé's fantastic. He was in the middle of getting THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS together and we chatted and I thought, yes, this is the guy to make this film."



Before he began work on the script, Anderson visited Gipsy House, the Dahl family's estate in Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, England, where the late author famously worked in a writing hut in the garden.



"He came to Gipsy House and we spent a very wet muddy day walking all over the hills, the woods, the dales, everywhere and we had good fun," Felicity Dahl continues.



"I went to Gipsy House in March, and it was drenched in mud," Anderson says. "Liccy gave me a pair of rubber boots and one of Dahl's old fishing hats and took me around the property. There is a gigantic beech tree at the end of a fox run, which I immediately recognized from Fantastic Mr. Fox. There is a painted gypsy caravan under a tree, which I had seen in dust-jacket photographs. There is a stone half buried on the edge of the drive with the word 'gipsy' carved into it.



"Liccy showed me into Dahl's famous writing hut," Anderson continues. "There is part of a bone from his hip on the table next to his first metal hip replacement, which didn't take. There is a 10-pound ball of aluminum foil made from several years of Cadbury chocolate wrappers. There is a little surgical valve he invented that saved his son from hydrocephalus (a.k.a. water on the brain). That night Liccy left me to examine Dahl's manuscripts in an office next to the guesthouse. An archivist made me wash my hands twice with special soap and told me to close all the curtains and lock the door when I was finished. I was alone with dozens of handwritten drafts with Dahl's sketches in the margins, and I could see his whole process laid out in front of me. More than ever, I felt as if I were in his presence."



During the visit, Anderson asked Dahl if he and his frequent writing partner, Noah Baumbach (THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU, THE SQUID AND THE WHALE), could come and stay at Gipsy House to write the script. "He said, 'I think I'll feel the atmosphere and everything much better,'" Felicity Dahl recalls. "I said, I'd be delighted. So a few months later he and Noah moved into our spare bedrooms in the annex and stayed here for two weeks and they wrote the screenplay upstairs in one of the bedrooms and we fed and wined them royally and it was terrific fun, we had an amazing time. And off he went when the screenplay was finished and eventually sent me a copy. I read it that night and gave it to my grandson Luke to read the next day and he said, 'This is fantastic, you've got to do it', and so that was that."



"I think he felt inspired by being there," says producer Allison Abbate (IRON GIANT, CORPSE BRIDE) of Anderson's time at Gipsy House, "and if you ever go there, it is very inspiring. Just the legacy of Roald Dahl, the writing hut, and the countryside around it, were a huge part of the vision for how to create this film. There are lots of fun bits within the movie that are based on that area and their house."



"Gipsy House influenced him enormously," agrees Felicity Dahl. "I think he felt close to Roald here, and we have all the archives of every book Roald wrote. Every draft of every book is in the archives in the museum in the village and so he was able to look at early drafts of the book and also the most enchanting notebook Roald illustrated himself, he had the foxes pushing supermarket trolleys in it, and all those things moved him greatly, I think."



"Dahl was a very interesting man with many colors," notes Anderson. "We spent time at his house when we were writing and a lot of the details of his life found their way into our story and into the character of Mr. Fox. Dahl probably wrote Mr. Fox to be an animal version of himself, and so when we were writing it, without ever putting it into words, that was intuitively what we were doing."



"I think Roald would quite like to think of himself as Fantastic Mr. Fox," muses Felicity Dahl. "He loved helping people, particularly the underdog, but also because of the many medical tragedies that the family had been through, and he hated injustice. So yes, I think he would have liked to have been Mr. Fox, and he was in a certain way."



Inevitably, to turn Dahl's slim children's story into a film required changes. "Not enough happens to make a feature-length movie," Anderson explains, "so we knew we had to invent a lot. But as we did it, all we wanted to do was to try and write something that we hoped Roald Dahl would think was suitable and fit with what he has invented in the first place. We were trying to write a Roald Dahl movie. I mean, we're not going to think up the same jokes that Roald Dahl would, and we're bringing our own personalities to it. But our goal was to try and do a Roald Dahl story."



While Anderson and Baumbach retained the core of the tale, they expanded the story to include not only new scenes, but new characters. "His adaptation is pretty organic to the story," insists Abbate who feels all the additions adhere to the tone and the spirit of Dahl's original material. "And the new characters feel organic, too."



"It's not so much a beat for beat adaptation as it is an adaptation through the mind of a different writer," says producer Jeremy Dawson. "That being said, almost any line that is in the book, of a character speaking, pretty much ends up in our story. We even tried to use [Dahl's] chapter headings, like: 'Mr. Fox has a plan'."



"A lot of changes have been made because it's a small book, so it had to be embroidered," muses Felicity Dahl, "and I think Roald would have approved a great deal of what Wes and Noah wrote in order to make it a full-length feature. I think it's sad that Wes never met Roald because I think they would have got on very well. But maybe it was better that Wes didn't meet Roald because he met him through the book, through his passion for the book."



In Anderson's FANTASTIC MR. FOX, Mr. Fox, voiced by George Clooney (MICHAEL CLAYTON, OCEAN'S 11), is a former bird thief turned newspaper columnist who, against the advice of his lawyer, Badger (Bill Murray), moves his family into an expensive beech tree near three farms belonging to farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean. "The tree that he lives in is like a haughty midlife crisis decision," explains Abbate. "It's dangerous and it's above his means."



Needless to say, the temptation of living so close to the farms is too great for Mr. Fox to resist, and soon he's back to his old ways. Together with his opossum pal Kylie and sporty nephew Kristofferson, Mr. Fox is soon raiding the three farms for chickens, geese, turkeys and cider, putting himself on a collision course with the farmers who vow to rid themselves of this furry menace by any means necessary.



In Dahl's story, Mr. Fox has four unnamed cubs. "They're just sort of referred to, essentially," says Anderson who, together with Baumbach, decided to reduce that number to one, but flesh out the character with a back story and a substantial role in the overall narrative. And so Mr. Fox now has a son called Ash, a geeky misfit and comic book obsessive who doesn't relate to his father.



"He doesn't really know who he is and wants his father's love and approval," says long-time Anderson friend and collaborator Jason Schwartzman (RUSHMORE, FUNNY PEOPLE), who voices Ash. "I want to be a great athlete like my dad, and I want to be smart like him. I want recognition. My character's whole story line is coming to terms with who he is. And I think that's what the movie's about. It's being okay with who you are. And the thing that makes you different is the thing that makes you special. In the end, it turns out that my smallness and my differences save some lives."



"Wes wanted to try and build on the kid characters so there's another generation of foxes," explains Dawson of the introduction of Ash and his cousin Kristofferson. "And that creates a family dynamic."



"It's a family dynamic, or, more accurately, a dysfunctional family dynamic that we can recognize from Anderson's previous films. The story and the way it unfolds, the way he composes a shot and paces a sequence; they are all very Wes Anderson," notes Abbate.



"What I love about the movie is that Wes didn't change his style of directing and storytelling to fit the animated genre," agrees Schwartzman. "He just brought the genre to him and made his own movie as if it was another Wes Anderson film, which it is."



One quintessential Anderson addition to the story is whack-bat, an entirely new sport that's an amalgam of cricket, rounders and baseball and which is played by Ash and his cousin. "People were liking the kids characters," reveals Dawson of whack-bat's genesis, "and we thought, Let's try and expand them a little bit, add a few more scenes where the kids are not with the family, and Wes came up with this. Once he'd written the scene, we retroactively decided what the game would look like and how we'd play it."



The rules of the game are outlined in a hilarious sequence by Ash's Coach Skip, a ferret voiced by Anderson's long-time friend and collaborator Owen Wilson (MARLEY & ME). "It has lots of ridiculously complicated rules and lots of physical funny activity," laughs Abbate. "Symbolically it is about Ash trying to get his father's attention. Mr. Fox was an amazing athlete, and won all the trophies in whack-bat, and so Ash failing or succeeding at the game means a lot to him, and plays into the ending of the film a little bit."





STOP-MOTION



First seen in Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton's 1898 film THE HUMPTY DUMPTY CIRCUS, stop-motion animation is one of the oldest forms of special effects, and the meticulous, labor-intensive process hasn't changed much since its introduction more than a century ago. The technique involves the frame-by-frame manipulation of a three-dimensional object - a puppet, a model or even an actor - to bring it to life and make it appear to move. Typically there are 24 frames of film per second of screen time, and so the object's body, head, arms, legs, hands, fingers, eyes, ears, and mouth must be moved in infinitesimally small increments between frames, which, when the film is projected, creates the illusion of movement.



"I've always loved stop-motion," says Anderson, who had previously included several stop-motion sequences in his 2004 feature THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU, sequences that were directed by stop-motion superstar Henry Selick (CORALINE). "But the thing I've always loved with stop-motion, more than anything else, is puppets that have fur."



"One of the things Wes likes about stop-motion is that there's a magic to it," says Dawson. "He likes that it's handmade, and there's a craft to it. He's not a big fan of computer imagery, per se, because he likes process. The aesthetic of stop-motion lets you use lots of textures and crafted little things, and all his movies are so designed and executed and every detail is thought out. So it's sort of a perfect medium in that case."



From the original KING KONG in 1933 to George Lucas' STAR WARS, this painstaking art has been responsible for many of cinema's classic moments, thanks in no small part to the work of early exponents such as Willis O'Brien (KING KONG, MIGHTY JOE YOUNG) and his young protégé Ray Harryhausen (JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD) whose name became synonymous with the medium.



Although stop-motion or stop-frame animation was still used as a visual effects technique in Hollywood up until the early '90s, the advent of computer-generated imagery had effectively reduced its use to television shows, commercials, short films and music videos. Then, in 1993, TIM BURTON'S THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS paved the way for audiences, and for Hollywood, to see stop-motion animation in a new light, resulting in movies such as Selick's own Roald Dahl adaptation JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, Nick Park's CHICKEN RUN and WALLACE & GROMIT IN THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT, Burton's CORPSE BRIDE and Selick's recent CORALINE.



While the fundamentals of stop-motion have remained the same for more than a hundred years, improvements in puppet technology, the use of digital still cameras instead of film, as well as the introduction of computers, video assists, and the ability to remove rigs that hold puppets in place for previously impossible shots in post-production, have all helped make animation slicker than ever before. By contrast, for FANTASTIC MR. FOX, Anderson was interested in returning to a form of stop-motion that was less polished, less refined, less like CGI, and which felt more old-fashioned and more handmade.



"I love the way King Kong, the old King Kong, looked, with his fur. The animators call it 'boiling'. And for some reason the whole magical aspect of stop-motion was one of those things where you can see the trick. The Cocteau movies, the visual effects in BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE), for instance, are things where you can really see that a person is behind this wall sticking their arm through, holding a torch, and the film is running backwards, and so that is how this light is coming on. Those kinds of effects where you can see what it is, have always been the most fascinating and mesmerizing to me. And with stop-motion, the whole film is that sort of thing in a way, to my mind," says Anderson.



Anderson's biggest inspiration was Russian stop-motion pioneer Ladislas Starevich's 1941 feature LE ROMAN DE RENARD (THE TALE OF THE FOX), which used puppets made from real animal skins, and which had the handmade quality he was after, as well as a crude, "herky-jerky" style of animation. "Wes was definitely not looking for a super-polished thing," notes animation director Mark Gustafson. "He wants you to feel the materials and understand how it was done. It's not slick by a long shot. No one will mistake this for CGI."





VOICE CAST



Although Anderson and Baumbach's FANTASTIC MR. FOX script retained the book's English countryside setting and its English farmers, all the animal characters are American. At the very least they're voiced by American actors. "The animals tend to have American accents and the humans are English," explains Abbate. "No one knows what accent an animal would have if it talked and animals have nationalities. We started with George Clooney as Mr. Fox and that kind of set the rule to keep them all consistent."



To play the crafty, sly and decidedly roguish antihero Mr. Fox, Anderson only ever had George Clooney in mind. "George seemed like a natural choice," he states of the producer, writer, director and Oscar®-winning actor, "because we needed somebody who was going to be a hero, and I think he is that automatically. I've wanted to work with him for a long time. So we sent him the script, and he said he'd do it."



Adds Abbate, "George was born to play this part. He's the right combination of Cary Grant and Clark Gable. He's got the debonair, gentlemanly quality of Grant as well as the animalistic, sexy side. I really believe he could steal some chickens."



As Mr. Fox's pragmatic, artistic and resolutely faithful wife Felicity, Anderson cast multiple Academy Award® nominee and two-time Oscar® winner Meryl Streep (DOUBT). "When else am I going to be Mrs. George Clooney?" laughs Streep of accepting the role.



"There is no better actress and she completely brought to life a character," says Anderson.



"She was an amazing choice," says Abbate. "She's the moral center of the movie in many ways. She can be strong, she can be funny, and she is definitely wifely. She stands by her man and helps him get out of scrapes. She's got a great relationship with Mr. Fox. She keeps him honest."



"She's the one person he can't lie to," muses Bill Murray, who voices Mr. Fox's lawyer Badger and previously lent his voice to Garfield the cat for GARFIELD and GARFIELD: A TAIL OF TWO KITTIES. "I mean, he can sort of try to deceive her but she knows who he is. She is sort of a magical creature."



Murray, who previously worked with Anderson on RUSHMORE, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS and THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU, originally wanted to give his character a Wisconsin accent. "Because the badger is the mascot of the University of Wisconsin and it's badger country," says the actor. "I worked on my accent very hard. I did the first few scenes with [it], and I was feeling really pleased." Alas, Anderson wasn't so keen. "He said, I see him as sort of a Saville Row-lawyer kind of a badger, which is fair enough - and it's worked out great."



Producer Abbate agrees. "Bill Murray took a part that was originally very small and made it something really funny," she says. "He has so much personality he anchors the movie right from the very start."



Filling out the rest of the voice cast were many who had worked with Anderson before, and who form part of his unofficial company of actors, including Jason Schwartzman as Ash, Owen Wilson (THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS) as Coach Skip, Willem Dafoe (SPIDERMAN, THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU) as the villainous Rat, Brian Cox (RUSHMORE) as a TV reporter, Academy Award® winner Adrien Brody (THE PIANIST, THE DARJEELING LIMITED) in a brief cameo as Rickety the mouse, and Wally Wolodarsky, who played the assistant in THE DARJEELING LIMITED, as Kylie the opossum. Even executive producer Dawson was roped in. "Wes likes to use a lot of his friends and family," Abbate reveals. "Jeremy's the voice of the Beaver's son. His live action prop master is the Mole." Anderson's younger brother, Eric, who worked as an illustrator on the film, was enlisted to play Ash's cousin Kristofferson. "I think he is really a revelation," says Murray of Eric Anderson.



As Franklin Bean, the meanest and most ruthless of the three farmers, Anderson cast acclaimed British actor Michael Gambon (HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE). "I think Michael is perfect casting for Mr. Bean," says Murray who starred alongside him in THE LIFE AQUATIC. "You don't really see that dark side of Michael much, although he's got a lot of power."



When it came to finding someone to voice Rabbit, Anderson called upon internationally renowned chef Mario Batali. "It's a small part but it's a chef," says Abbate, "and so Wes thought he'd go to his favorite American one." Meanwhile, pop musician and former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker not only voices banjo-playing Bean farmhand Petey (who looks very much like Jarvis), but sings a song too, the inventively titled "Petey's Song", which he co-wrote with Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach.



Anderson himself plays the character of Weasel, the real estate agent who sells Mr. Fox the beech tree at the beginning. "He's really funny," says Abbate.



Typically, the dialogue for animated films is recorded in a studio in advance. Anderson adopted a much more organic approach to recording the voice track for FANTASTIC MR. FOX and spent a few days on a farm in Connecticut with Clooney, Murray, Schwartzman and Wally Wolodarsky recording the dialogue "as live", with the performers acting out the scenes as they would a radio play. If there was a scene set in a field, the cast would run around a field with the boom operator chasing after them. Scenes in the cider cellar were recorded in a basement. For those in a barn, they went into a barn.



"We recorded the voices in kind of an unconventional way," Anderson recalls. "George was happy to do that which I really appreciated. I thought it would be nice if we could have our cast together and try and make it a fun experience recording the voices, and that it might be nice if it sounded like when you were outside, that you were really outside -- if we just did it for real. If we're going to record by a river, we'll go over by the river and if we're meant to be in an underground tunnel, we'll do it in somebody's basement. And that was the way we recorded it. And it was fun."



"The dream was to have the cast run around and act out these scenes," recalls Schwartzman, "so you could get people out of breath, overlapping each other, things that happen in real movies that you tend not to see in animated films because things are done so separately. And so if the foxes are digging a hole, Wes got us on the ground and actually had us digging in the ground."





PRODUCTON DESIGN:

SETS AND COSTUMES



When it comes to the look of his films, Wes Anderson takes a complete hands-on approach to art direction and design; the result is amazing, inimitable confections of meticulously crafted nostalgia and intricate set dressing. FANTASTIC MR. FOX is no exception.



"The thing about Wes, he is a visionary and has a very clear and precise vision," says Abbate. "He's very detail orientated. He has input into every character design, every prop design. Everything in the movie has his mark on it."



Inspiration, it seems, can strike Anderson anywhere, anytime. The look of one background farm worker was based on a 17th century oil painting Anderson saw in a restaurant in Germany. "We were on the way to Prague and Wes saw a painting in the back," Dawson recalls. "We took pictures and that was the inspiration for the design of Earl Malloy."



"He likes to curate elements out of his experience, and has a mind that's really good at doing that," continues Dawson who says the design of Mrs. Bean's kitchen was inspired by the tiles in a Parisian bakery near Anderson's home, as well as the dining room at St. John's restaurant in Smithfield, London. "Anything that catches his eye he wants to use."



"Wes is very reference-based," notes production designer Nelson Lowry whose stop-motion credits include CORPSE BRIDE and who found Anderson's method a refreshing change of pace. "He likes to draw from everyday reference and that's really a bit of a departure for stop-frame because in stop-frame you can do anything. You don't often draw from real-life reference. You make stuff up. We all draw upon our environment. It's just Wes is more aware and purposeful when he does it. He scans over his world and picks a seemingly random pattern of influences that when you pull them together are very Wes Anderson."



While working with a director with such a specific vision might have fazed some designers, Lowry says he found it rather liberating. "It's the opposite of what you're usually faced with, a director who doesn't know what they want. Wes knows what he wants. He knows what spoon he wants. Or if he doesn't, he knows what spoon he doesn't want."



Lowry began work on FANTASTIC MR. FOX by studying all of Anderson's previous films, looking for points of similarity, design-wise. "The Wes code is pretty tough to crack," he reveals. "I went through every film he made, took stills of them, put them up on my office walls, hundreds of them, and I started to look for things that are common, aside from the framing which is terribly important. I started noticing color combinations, textures and patterns that were in similar places in the frame. Once I started to understand that, I could look for similar items or references based on those. It took a good three, four months to see that pattern emerge. But it was fun. It was like a puzzle to solve."



With a team of around a dozen illustrators, some working exclusively on character designs, others on sets, Lowry began to build the world of FANTASTIC MR. FOX, starting with Mr. Fox himself. "The environments really had to follow the lead of the character design because they have to meld so completely," Lowry explains, "so we really didn't do too much until we had a good idea of what Mr. Fox looked like. And what the farmers looked like."



Anderson wanted his animal characters to be more human than animal. He wanted them to walk upright, wear tailored clothes and have human-like proportions.



"He was thinking about human actors, basically," Lowry says. "You could tell he was always trying to drive the design into what he saw was a human actor, so they are very anthropomorphised. Mr. Fox's proportions went from being very animal-like to having square shoulders, human-like proportions."



"Initially when he was sculpted and designed, he was very much like an animal," says animation supervisor Mark Waring of Mr. Fox. "He had the back legs that bent and he had a slightly hunched animal pose, and gradually he was straightened out and became more and more human."



Again, Starevich's LE ROMAN DE RENARD was a major influence on the look of the animal characters. "Wes was inspired by the rough, kind of crazy construction of the characters in that film," Lowry explains. "They had a very creepy sort of realism to them, and we tried to get some of that into the designs. So they're naturalistic and yet still stylised but not as, say, in a typical film where you would see very cute versions of these animals. They remain a bit sophisticated and adult looking."



The production designer also took inspiration from Victorian photographs of animals dressed in clothes. "Little kittens having tea parties, things like that. It's so wrong yet it's very compelling," he says. "So there's a bit of that in the character design as well."



For helping nail down the look of Mr. Fox and the other characters, Lowry acknowledges the contribution of Felicie Haymoz, a young Belgium illustrator. "She's only in her early 20s and was critical to the design," he reflects. "She had a very specific, detailed way of drawing that Wes responded to and she could turn several designs over and over again to get exactly what he wanted, and would do four or five variations. As a director and as a designer, because I think he's both, Wes loves to work from a menu, so we would