wes anderson Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Yahoo! has posted an incredibly cool video of George Clooney acting out his role as Mr. Fox in the freakin' adorable Fantastic Mr. Fox. The video shows cool side-by-side comparisons of Clooney acting out different scenes on a farm with costar Wallace Wolodarsky, who voices loopy sidekick Kylie, as well as just running around pretending to be Mr. Fox, down to rolling around on the ground and doing his super cool whistle.

This behind-the-scenes peek at Mr. Fox also offers mini-interviews with director Wes Anderson, producer Allison Abbate, and Bill Murray (Badger) about working with Clooney on the film. The funniest part shows an argument between Mr. Fox and Badger, which involves growling and swiping, split-screened against the actors themselves doing the voices in an office.

As Abbate notes, "There couldn't be a more perfect Mr. Fox, because he has the Cary Grant suave, debonair sparkle where he can talk his way out of any situation, which is so our Mr. Fox character. He's just got a great voice."

Clooney's got a rather full docket this season, with The Men Who Stare at Goats coming out this week, Fantastic Mr. Fox coming out at the end of November, and Up in the Air out on Christmas day.

Click through to see the video itself, then let us know which Clooney feature you're going to be lining up for at the theaters this season, by cuss!

It's not hard to like any movie that uses the Beach Boys' music, but Wes Anderson makes it especially easy. As Hollywood's foremost purveyor of hipster drama, his pedigree as a reliable selector of appropriately wistful, poignant and all-around unforgettable songs is virtually unrivaled, but Fantastic Mr. Fox exceeds even the work of his earlier films, using "Heroes and Villains," and later, "I Get Around" as populist punctuation that manages to be both specifically relevant and substantively rousing.

As an animated opus, the film is by necessity his most controlled to date, a painstakingly-designed dollhouse where he no longer controls just the music, sets, and costumes, but the performers themselves. Ironically, however, it feels like his loosest as well - a gloriously unwieldy comedy of manners submerged in the minutiae of Anderson's madcap creativity. All of which makes Fantastic Mr. Fox a celebration both of its stop-motion medium and Anderson's aesthetic, while still managing to fully document the spectacular fun in original author Roald Dahl's daffy, distinctive imagination.

Not long ago we told you about a little contest in which Fox Searchlight and Gen Art were bringing filmmakers and designers together to see which team could produce the best How-To video with the theme being Fantastic Mr. Fox costumes, based on the Wes Anderson movie due out next month. The idea behind it was that aspiring designers would submit costume designs, while aspiring filmmakers turned in treatments. From there a team of judges narrowed it down, chose the winning designs, and filmmakers were then given a small budget to go produce mini How-To videos/short films based on the costume design.

Some time has passed now, and Fox Searchlight has chosen four finalists. You can watch the four finalists over at the Searchlight site now (and my personal favorite after the jump), but Gen Art has also posted director's cut videos for two of the finalists, as well as a runner-up video over on their site. (I recommend watching the Ash Fox extended cut because it's full of Wes Anderson references and just a tad insane.)

If anything these videos will show you how to pull together a Fantastic Mr. Fox Halloween costume at the last minute on the cheap. As far as the actual film goes, that will arrive in theaters on November 13th.

I know that directors sometimes must direct scenes from a room separate and sometimes distant from the actors, but directing from another country? By e-mail? That's the story filtering out of England, where Fantastic Mr. Fox, the new adult-skewing animated movie from Wes Anderson featuring voice work by George Clooney, Meryl Streep, and Bill Murray, is set to have its world premiere at the London Film Festival on Wednesday.

According to Chris Lee, reporting in Los Angeles Times, Anderson had no desire to spend a year at Three Mills Studio in London during the physical production of the stop-motion animated project. Instead, the director 'holed up' in Paris for most of the time. His move and his exacting requirements did not endear him to all of his crew. "He has made our lives miserable," Mark Gustafson, the film's director of animation, said. Anderson asserts that he was trying to make something different. "The movie would not be the way I wanted it if I just did it the way people were accustomed to doing it. I realized this is an opportunity to do something nobody's ever seen before." And not everyone was upset about Anderson's absence. Producer Allison Abbate said absent directors aren't unusual in the field: "Making stop-motion is like watching paint dry."

After sending digital files of what they were working on, the animators received "detailed e-mail instructions about what to change" from Anderson, who also acted out certain scenes for them as reference material. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and we'll get to see for ourselves soon enough. After London, the film will have its North American premiere at AFI Fest in Los Angeles on October 30, before Fox Searchlight opens it on November 13.

If you're an aspiring filmmaker or an aspiring designer, then you might dig this latest contest from our good friends at Gen Art. The company, who specialize in promoting emerging talent in film, music and fashion, have partnered with Fox Searchlight and Wes Anderson's upcoming flick The Fantastic Mr. Fox on a competition that asks designers and filmmakers to incorporate these foxy characters into what they do best.

The meat and potatoes of the contest revolve around designers pitching easy-to-make Fantastic Mr. Fox costumes, and then filmmakers using the winning designs to create a do-it-yourself video that teaches folks at home how to make the costume themselves. Of course there's plenty of room for tons of creative freedom -- just how you design your costume or shoot your how-to video is completely up to the artist, with some fine cash prizes for the winners. Check out all the specifics over at the contest's official website, then let us know if you enter so we can scope out your creation. Assuming the finalist videos are available online, we'll be back to show you what the finished products looks like. In the meantime, check out the trailer for The Fantastic Mr. Fox (which hits theaters November 13) after the jump.

A few months ago, a good friend of mine saw a test screening of Fantastic Mr. Fox (no 'The') and described it as very much the union between Roald Dahl's story and Wes Anderson's style. Now, it looks like the trailer up on Yahoo! and after our jump confirms as much, and I actually find myself genuinely charmed by it -- like, 'now on my radar' charmed.

This tale of a sly fox (voiced by George Clooney, natch) taking on some grumpy farmers reminded me a great deal of Chicken Run, if it were inspired less by The Great Escape and more by Ocean's Eleven, and while it does look perfectly family-friendly, it really does seem to be a Wes Anderson film through and through -- only Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and Jason Schwartzman are all talking animals in stop-motion. (Hell, it's probably the most animated Murray's been in years!)

(Pun half-intended.)

Also starring Meryl Streep and apparently released by Fox proper (as opposed to Fox Searchlight), Fantastic Mr. Fox is due to open on November 13th.

Not long ago the first image from Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox arrived online and was quickly removed, but now the French website filmsactu has nabbed the first two images from Fox France and, well, here they are. Starring the voices of Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody and Anjelica Huston among others, the film reunites your typical Anderson cronies and adds a few more to the filmmaker's ever-growing list of regulars.



Based on Ronald Dahl's book of the same name, the film follows Mr. Fox (Clooney) and his family who are targeted by wealthy, angry farmers after the fox steals their chickens, ducks and turkeys from right underneath their noses. This is the first adaptation for Anderson, who up until this point has collaborated with a handful of close friends (Owen Wilson, Noah Baumbach, Roman Coppola) on original stories. Originally Anderson was co-directing with Henry Selick, though Selick later left to go work on Coraline and was replaced by Mark Gustafson. Perhaps the coolest little fact about the making of this film was that Anderson took his actors outside the studio in order to record their voices, winding up in places like a forest, an attic, a stable and even underground.

Fantastic Mr. Fox hits theaters on November 13th.

Writer-director Rian Johnson burst onto the scene when his high school-set noir riff, Brick, took home the Originality of Vision prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Now, after bouncing around Summit's release slate like the proverbial beach ball, his follow-up -- the romantic, romanticized con man caper, The Brothers Bloom -- is finally receiving a NY/LA bow this Friday before rolling out to more markets in the weeks to come.

Johnson obliged us to do a follow-up interview this week to complement our original chat from last November, and between the two, the filmmaker discusses everything from making the festival rounds and absorbing critical response to the glory of talking monkeys and just where he likes to stick his tea kettle...



Download Part 1 (31 mins.) by clicking here



Download Part 2 (12 mins.) by clicking here

-Score samples by Nathan Johnson, the film's composer and the director's cousin.-

I guess the one downside to this entire video is that there isn't really a Wes Anderson Film Festival in Austin, Texas on October 2nd of this year. Even though I probably wouldn't have traveled all the way to Austin to watch a marathon of Anderson's films up on the big screen, it still would've been a cool event to promote to those of you Anderson fans in and around the Austin (which should probably change its name to Awesome and be done with it already) area. But let me back up for a minute ...

Film school students Alex Cornell and Phil Mills were given an assignment to shoot a commercial for a fictional film festival, and they had the freedom to do whatever so long as their commercial promoted the fictional film festival and stayed true to their brand. I'll let Alex take over from here (from his blog post): "There were a multitude of directions this could take; we thought the most fun way would be to shoot a Royal Tenenbaums-esque short, and then just throw as much craziness as we could at it. Phil plays T. Allen Fenway, a fictional character we made up to live in our Wes Anderson film festival world. We wanted it to remind you of Wes Anderson, make you laugh, and eventually turn you on to the festival. The 3rd person narrator, use of Futura Bold for all titles, extravagant setting, and full blown randomness were all utilized to aid in conjuring this look and feel."

Check out the commercial below, and head on over to this blog for more on how they put this together. Special thanks to Cinematical reader James T. for the tip.

Wes Anderson Trailer from Alex Cornell on Vimeo.

Ah, another week, another jumble to the calendar -- specifically, to 20th Century Fox's release slate.

According to Box Office Mojo, the studio has moved The Tooth Fairy back from November 13th to next January (because where else are you going to stick a Dwayne-Johnson-as-hockey-player-as-tooth-fairy outing?), and Wes Anderson's The Fantastic Mr. Fox has moved back a week from 11/6 to 11/13 as their choice contender for the family dollar. This now places it right after Disney and Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol (really, the first week of November?) and just before Warners' Cats & Dogs sequel (really, the second movie of Cats & Dogs?).

I'm not sure how much Johnson's recent Race to Witch Mountain cost, but I can't help but think that he'd like to outperform that film's good-not-great $60-ish million gross, and January could be just the grounds to do that in. (Paul Blart: Mall Cop opened within a week of the proposed new date and has raked in... almost $144 million? Yep, over $140 million.) Mr. Fox, on the other hand, is a mainstream proving ground for the ever-quirky Anderson, and with a voice cast that includes George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, and Anjelica Huston, let's hope it has reason to top the $28 million gross of that last animated adaptation of a Roald Dahl book, 1996's James and the Giant Peach.

But of course, none of that matters, because the real news is that Sandra Bullock's apparent psychological thriller rom-com All About Steve has found itself a home on September 4th. Sure, it's a little early in the awards season to stake a claim, but I'll leave the for-your-consideration campaign in their hands...