The Fantastic Mr. Fox, an animated film based on the Roald Dahl children’s novel, marks the first animated film directed by Wes Anderson, and the first stop-motion animated film distributed by 20th Century Fox.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox, an animated film based on the Roald Dahl children’s novel, marks the first animated film directed by Wes Anderson, and the first stop-motion animated film distributed by 20th Century Fox.
While the movie is indeed a fine reflection of the classic stop-motion style, with detailed, handcrafted miniature sets, underneath that wrapping is a subtle use of CGI (see “One Step at a Time,” January 2010). The primary work for VFX artists working on The Fantastic Mr. Fox was to duplicate sets, create set extensions, remove animation rigs, animate CG chickens, and composite stop-motion characters into backgrounds.
Because shooting a stop-motion film is labor-intensive and expensive, the VFX crew focused on preparation. “We had to work closely with the animators to make sure everything ran as smooth as possible,” says Tim Ledbury, visual effects supervisor. “We’d sit for hours in breakdown meetings going over how shots should be done before we shot a scene. We even had testing periods where I might go off with a lead animator, work out how to do something, and come back with a solution. It’s very expensive to re-do a shot, so once it was done, it was done. All the planning helped us a lot.”
“Almost everything was animated against greenscreen or on set,” Ledbury continues. “If Mr. Fox moved his arm near a candle, they’d animate him, and then animate candle flames against black, and we’d comp them in.” Animators carved the flames out of orange soap and animated them frame by frame.
Although Anderson preferred using photographed elements, like the orange-soap flames, the VFX crew did create what Ledbury calls “a few bits and pieces” in CG. “Leaves, dirt, crumbs, and things like that,” he says. “Some were hand-animated, others were simulated and tweaked. Because we were trying to re-create a stop-motion style with characters animated on every two frames—12 positions per second—it meant we needed to simulate on every two frames. But, the computer doesn’t like to hold a simulation for two frames; it wants to create a smooth path. I’ve seen simulations in stop-motion films and they don’t work stylistically. So, the simplest thing to do is take out every other frame of the simulation. But to be honest, if we had to go down that route, Wes would often just say ‘No.’”
The group would hold many breakdown meetings before a scene was even shot. “[Anderson] was quite intensive about how we should do shots,” says Ledbury. “We would sit for hours going over how things should be done. There were testing periods where I might go off with the lead animator, work out how to do something, come back and report if I had found a solution. Depending on what the issue was, then we had to split off and go into different teams to work it out.”
All that work is getting a lot of attention. Recently, the movie was nominated for a Golden Globe. Could an Oscar nomination be far behind?