Fantastic Mr. Fox -Animation April

-


 Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009 US) Wes Anderson directs this stop motion film about a married with child fox having a mid-life crisis. As I've talked about before I love stop-motion. What I like about creating animation is that you have so much control in what's in front of the camera, mis-en-scene. You have to put in so much more work but it's a wonderful trade-off. For a director like Anderson this medium is perfect and he certainly makes the most of it. Anderson loves his symmetry and he really leaned into it in this film. That symmetry includes his color pallet which is wonderfully balanced. The film was based on the Roald Dahl book of the same name. I'm told that the film diverges from the book a lot. Apparently, the book did not have enough material to pack a feature length film. Rest assured book purists Anderson somehow got his hands on and used notes written by Dahl featuring scenes and storylines that didn't make it into the book. So its kind of faithful. I really like Anderson's work and enjoyed his whimsical take on this story. One of the "problems" with stop motion is fur. Just ask the first King-Kong. It tends to take on a mind of it's own, goes all over the place and dare I say it "Whimsical". I just love how Anderson viewed it as a character trait and didn't try to hide it. I love that. It feels "human". Find it on HBO and Hulu and for rent on most streaming. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bound- Noir Hot Take

-
Image
  Bound (1996 US) Todays second entry for #FemaleFilmmakerFriday is this Wachowski sisters neo-noir masterpiece. Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon concoct a scheme to steal money from Tilly's mob boyfriend. Tilly rocks as the femme fatale. It just felt like she was loving this role. Gershon plays the sap and she knocks it out if the park. It’s really hard to shoot noir style in color. The Wachowskis pulled it off with muted color production design and black to get the proper contrast and shadow. I'm not a big fan of the current trend of having bright colors and crushed blacks to get the contrast. Happy colors don't scream noir. It screams Teletubbies. Wikipedia says the budget was 6 million but I heard 3. Why is that important? Lower budgets are really going to cut down on so many things including locations. There was limited locations in this. Either way audiences liked it and it made money at the Box Office. It’s on Tubi and Pluto for free and rentable on other streaming pl
Read more

Shrek-Hot Take

-
Image
 Shrek (2001 US) Its #FemaleFimmakerFriday and today's entry is this now classic animated kids film directed by Vicky Jenson and Andrew Adamson. An Ogre sets upon rescuing the princess from a tower guarded by a dragon. If you are interested in going to see Dungeons and Dragons you will find there is a similarity to Shrek with D&D being just a bit more mature and live action. Jenson was not the first choice of director in charge of story. Kelly Asbury was first choice but departed to work on another film. Jenson and Adamson had their work cut out for them as a lot was going wrong including their star Chris Farley had passed away. Jenson was in charge of story and she was tasked with finding the right tone and story for the film. She did great and the film won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. You can clearly see her influence on the film: for instance the princess does not really need rescuing. When I first saw that I was like, "wow! I didn't know they could do that?&
Read more

Brick-Noir Hot Take

-
Image
  Brick (2005) This Neo-noir stars Joseph Gordon Levitt and was written and directed by then first time feature filmmaker Rian Johnson (Star Wars, Knives Out) and had a whopping budget of 450k (I have also heard 800k). This film was basically a Chandler story... in high school and Levitt was Marlowe. If you think that sounds weird. Well it is kind of but Johnson and Levitt made it work. Getting traditionally noir shots is hard and audiences and fans know their stuff. What I loved about this gem is that Johnson adds to the vocabulary of noir or neo-noir. How? New ways to get high contrast, deep shadow and the incongruent lines of German Expressionism. Johnson did his absolute best to get those lovely noir shots and he did quite often and with a budget of 450k. That's really hard. Johnson is one of my favorite directors. He just keeps surprising me. Like many low budget films this was all about natural light and locations. worth a watch. Rentable on most streaming.
Read more