This is the autumn, apparently, for our hippest filmmakers to get in touch not only with their inner child, but with their inner puppeteer as well. First it was Spike Jonze, whose Where the Wild Things Are conjured looming, lumbering monsters out of feathers, fur, and a daub of CGI. Now it’s Wes Anderson’s turn: In Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s sleek novella, he’s one-upped Jonze’s super-sized marionettes with a cast of miniaturized marvels, foxes and badgers and possums and rats, all exquisitely handcrafted and brought to life one painstakingly arranged frame at a time.
It’s a near-perfect marriage of filmmaker and form, since you might say that Anderson has spent most of his career trying to apply a stop-motion style to live-action films. From Rushmore onward, his sets have been designed within an inch of their life, and he’s arranged his actors against them like figures in a diorama, or dolls in the world’s most meticulous dollhouse — framing them in wide shots that accentuate their hyper-aestheticized surroundings and de-emphasize their agency.
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