Wes Anderson can’t catch a break either these days. We playfully jabbed/joked about the phoned-in voice performances of “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” and now Vulture is taking him to task for apparently emailing in some of his direction via quotes from those that worked on the film..
Evidently the film’s cinematographer threw him under the bus a little. Asked about their working relationship, the DP Tristan Oliver said:
“I think Wes doesn’t understand what you can do, and he often wants us to do what you can’t do, and the length of time the process takes … I don’t think he quite comprehends that, and how difficult it is to change something once you’ve started. It takes a big amount of someone’s time to change a very small thing. I think he also doesn’t understand that an animator is a performer. An animator is an actor. And this is the secret to animation: You direct your animator, you do not direct the puppet, because the puppet is an inanimate object. You direct an animator as if you’re directing an actor, and they will give you a performance. So we’ll get a note back from Wes saying ‘that arm movement is wrong.’ But that arm movement is part of a fluid performance. And that has been really quite difficult for the animators.”
Animator Mark Gustafson, who replaced Henry Selick on the project said Anderson was, “keeping his distance from the set and directing via e-mail, sending in his favorite DVDs to give an impression of what he’d like to see.”
We’re not gonna frame that too much otherwise the Rushmore Academy will descend down upon us like hawks. Look we’re hoping “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is great. Hopefully one of our U.K. writers will see it in London before the rest of the world does. And we’re out…
