Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animated adaptation of Roal Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” testscreened in New York this weekend and a surprising number of knowledgeable sources of ours attended.
They confirm that Meryl Streep not Cate Blanchett (as once was the plan) voices the lead Mrs. Fox — the husband of Mr. Fox as voiced by George Clooney — and that additional rumored voice cast members Owen Wilson, Michael Gambon (who was already rumored for sometime), Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody, Jarvis Cocker and Wes Anderson himself, are legit and part of the film.
Voices that are harder to spot but are also “rumored” to be in the film are Eric Anderson, Garth Jenning (“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) and Roman Coppola (co-writer and 2nd unit director on “The Darjeeling Limited”).
The film is still a work-in-progress so surely someone will suggest that this could change, and it could, parts or characters could be cut, but the fact that they did record parts for the film is a certainty (and Wilson’s part is supposed to be a blink-and-you’ll miss it voice part). Basically it appears the Dutch blog that purportedly had the casting credits had correct information.
Musically — and so far as it is a work in progress — there appears to be one Jarvis Cocker song (though he once said he was writing 3-4 songs), two Beach Boys tracks (“Heroes & Villains” and “I Get Around”), some Ennio Morricone, and the theme to Davy Crockett. No word on that Alexandre Desplat score, all our sources said it was a little hard to tell.
Though many have said the film looks like “Wallace & Gromit,” one our sources said, “not quite, it looked slicker.” And though they said, once again, the film was unfinished and parts had sketches in place of animation, they were “very impressed,” said the film felt like older (vintage?) Wes Anderson and expected the final product to be “amazing.” In the interest of fairness, they told us lots of details about who voices who, what their roles are, the detailed plot, etc., but lets not go there.
“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is due November 13 and it appears that Fox is big into screentesting as this is at least the 2nd time the film has been screened for early audiences.