The movie is considered a strong contender for an animation Oscar. It opens the London Film Festival with a gala screening tonight. It’s the opening-night attraction at the upcoming AFI Fest in Los Angeles.
But that’s not exactly why “Fantastic Mr. Fox” has been making headlines this week.
Director Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animated feature, based on a book by Roald Dahl, instead found itself in the spotlight courtesy of some good old-fashioned bad-mouthing, delivered by a couple of “Mr. Fox” crew members in a Sunday Los Angeles Times piece on the making of the film.
And it’s stayed in the spotlight courtesy of Fox, who sent a passel of reporters and bloggers (not this blogger, mind you) to London for one of the most noteworthy junkets of the year.
The trip obviously wasn’t envisioned as damage control, since it was in the works long before the Times article … but, on the other hand, reports out of London have done a decent job of shining up an image that had been a bit smudged by a story that painted Anderson as a capricious, remote autocrat.
According to the Times, Anderson didn’t want to be on the film’s London set for two years of painstaking stop-motion work. So after the voices were recorded – something done at a variety of locations, with Anderson present – the director stayed in Paris during principal photography, looking at footage and sending his input via email.
The film’s director of animation, Mark Gustafson, told reporter Chris Lee that Anderson “has made our lives miserable” by pushing them to abandon comfortable stop-motion techniques. Director of photography Tristan Oliver went further, terming the director “a little bit sociopathic” for his desire to stay in front of a computer, avoiding contact with people.
For his part, Anderson said he wanted a certain retro look, and wanted to push his crew to abandon some of their familiar stop-motion methods. “The simple reality is,” he said, “the movie would not be the way I wanted it if I just did it the way people were accustomed to doing it.”
The gripes were a relatively small part of the piece, and the only real surprise was that in this case the director is being called a sociopath in the press rather than outside his trailer (and out of his earshot) on the set. And one of the film’s producers, a stop-motion vet, even pointed out that the work is so slow and labor-intensive that it’s not usual for directors to not be physically present.
In the atmosphere stirred up by that story, a group of journalists landed in London this week for a few days of interviews and pub visits with the cast, a trip to Dahl’s home in Great Missenden, and tonight’s premiere. “Can good buzz be generated by good will?” asked Awards Daily’s Sasha Stone (who was not part of the junket).
For the most part, the buzzing from journalists who’ve been served drinks by Bill Murray has indeed been positive – as have most of the reviews, which so far have come from critics who’ve seen screenings, not from the London junketeers.
