PRODUCTON DESIGN:SETS AND COSTUMES
When it comes to the look of his films, Wes Anderson takes a complete hands-on approach to art direction and design; the result is amazing, inimitable confections of meticulously crafted nostalgia and intricate set dressing. FANTASTIC MR. FOX is no exception.
"The thing about Wes, he is a visionary and has a very clear and precise vision," says Abbate. "He's very detail orientated. He has input into every character design, every prop design. Everything in the movie has his mark on it."
Inspiration, it seems, can strike Anderson anywhere, anytime. The look of one background farm worker was based on a 17^th century oil painting Anderson saw in a restaurant in Germany. "We were on the way to Prague and Wes saw a painting in the back," Dawson recalls. "We took pictures and that was the inspiration for the design of Earl Malloy."
"He likes to curate elements out of his experience, and has a mind that's really good at doing that," continues Dawson who says the design of Mrs. Bean's kitchen was inspired by the tiles in a Parisian bakery near Anderson's home, as well as the dining room at St. John's restaurant in Smithfield, London. "Anything that catches his eye he wants to use."
"Wes is very reference-based," notes production designer Nelson Lowry whose stop-motion credits include CORPSE BRIDE and who found Anderson's method a refreshing change of pace. "He likes to draw from everyday reference and that's really a bit of a departure for stop-frame because in stop-frame you can do anything. You don't often draw from real-life reference. You make stuff up. We all draw upon our environment. It's just Wes is more aware and purposeful when he does it. He scans over his world and picks a seemingly random pattern of influences that when you pull them together are very Wes Anderson."
While working with a director with such a specific vision might have fazed some designers, Lowry says he found it rather liberating. "It's the opposite of what you're usually faced with, a director who doesn't know what they want. Wes knows what he wants. He knows what spoon he wants. Or if he doesn't, he knows what spoon he doesn't want."
Lowry began work on FANTASTIC MR. FOX by studying all of Anderson's previous films, looking for points of similarity, design-wise. "The Wes code is pretty tough to crack," he reveals. "I went through every film he made, took stills of them, put them up on my office walls, hundreds of them, and I started to look for things that are common, aside from the framing which is terribly important. I started noticing color combinations, textures and patterns that were in similar places in the frame. Once I started to understand that, I could look for similar items or references based on those. It took a good three, four months to see that pattern emerge. But it was fun. It was like a puzzle to solve."
With a team of around a dozen illustrators, some working exclusively on character designs, others on sets, Lowry began to build the world of FANTASTIC MR. FOX, starting with Mr. Fox himself. "The environments really had to follow the lead of the character design because they have to meld so completely," Lowry explains, "so we really didn't do too much until we had a good idea of what Mr. Fox looked like. And what the farmers looked like."
Anderson wanted his animal characters to be more human than animal. He wanted them to walk upright, wear tailored clothes and have human-like proportions.
"He was thinking about human actors, basically," Lowry says. "You could tell he was always trying to drive the design into what he saw was a human actor, so they are very anthropomorphised. Mr. Fox's proportions went from being very animal-like to having square shoulders, human-like proportions."
"Initially when he was sculpted and designed, he was very much like an animal," says animation supervisor Mark Waring of Mr. Fox. "He had the back legs that bent and he had a slightly hunched animal pose, and gradually he was straightened out and became more and more human."
Again, Starevich's LE ROMAN DE RENARD was a major influence on the look of the animal characters. "Wes was inspired by the rough, kind of crazy construction of the characters in that film," Lowry explains. "They had a very creepy sort of realism to them, and we tried to get some of that into the designs. So they're naturalistic and yet still stylised but not as, say, in a typical film where you would see very cute versions of these animals. They remain a bit sophisticated and adult looking."
The production designer also took inspiration from Victorian photographs of animals dressed in clothes. "Little kittens having tea parties, things like that. It's so wrong yet it's very compelling," he says. "So there's a bit of that in the character design as well."
For helping nail down the look of Mr. Fox and the other characters, Lowry acknowledges the contribution of Felicie Haymoz, a young Belgium illustrator. "She's only in her early 20s and was critical to the design," he reflects. "She had a very specific, detailed way of drawing that Wes responded to and she could turn several designs over and over again to get exactly what he wanted, and would do four or five variations. As a director and as a designer, because I think he's both, Wes loves to work from a menu, so we would provide him with many versions of the same drawing and he would choose the one he liked."
Lowry also tracked down Donald Chaffin, who'd illustrated the first edition of Fantastic Mr. Fox, and brought him onboard as part of the film's design team. "From what I understand Chaffin's book was quite an inspiration for Wes when he was a child, and those drawings really stuck in his head," Lowry says.
Once the character designs were locked down, Lowry turned his attentions to the film's various environments. Together with Abbate and Gustafson, he visited several chicken, turkey and squab farms across the UK. "Wes didn't want them to be a fairy tale, storybook kind of farm, all cute and quaint," says Abbate of the look Anderson was after for Boggis, Bunce and Bean's farms. "He wanted them to be real, with rusty, corrugated metal, bits of machinery and farm stuff that was authentic."
The biggest influence on the look of the film, however, came from Dahl himself, his estate in Great Missenden, and the surrounding landscape. Not only does Bean physically resemble Roald Dahl, Bean's house is based on the Gipsy House façade, with its big yellow door and whitewashed brick walls, while the kitchen provided the inspiration for Mr. and Mrs. Fox's kitchen.  Mr. Fox's study, meanwhile, is a perfect miniature recreation of Dahl's famous garden writing hut, right down to his upholstered chair, mug, and the tinfoil ball made from old Kit Kat wrappers that Dahl kept on his desk.
"It's really a nice nod to Roald Dahl," says the production designer, "to carry that mythology of the Dahl world into the film."
"Farmer Bean has a little bit of Dahl in him," says producer Dawson. "So does Bean's house which looks very similar to Gipsy House. Partly as an homage. Partly because the stuff looks good. Also, it's fun."
Mr. Fox's beech tree, too, was based on one, now fallen, that was just up the road from Gipsy House called the Witches Tree.  "On the cover of that book there is a tree, so I said to Wes, the real tree exists, it's a big beech tree, and it's just a little way up the lane from Gipsy House. And when Wes came here, the first thing he wanted to see was the beech tree which was amazing because about a year later, sadly, this 150-year-old tree fell. It just collapsed and is now horizontal rather than vertical and covered in brambles. It was sad, but, of course, in the film the tree is a very big feature, as indeed it is in the book."
Lowry reveals exactly how much that tree is in the film. "When I was there I took some of the bark and made a press mould. So some of the bark on Mr. Fox's tree in the set has some of the impression of that original tree."
Unlike live-action movies, stop-motion animation requires everything that goes before the camera to be created. Every character, every set, every prop, every item of clothing has to be handcrafted before a single frame of film can even be shot. From miniature magazines, to a mini iMac, to a supermarket full of food, everything is built from scratch. "You can't go to a prop house and buy anything," says Lowry, "so we had to make sure that everything we made, thousands of things, hundreds of different environments, all had something of Wes and his filmmaking in them."
Lowry estimates his team made in the region of 4000 props and up to 150 different sets. "It was a huge build," he says. "We had around 50 people in the workshop, from carpenters to painters to mold makers, research people, runners. And we really did shoot most of the stuff we made, which is rare. Another thing about Wes is he doesn't forget anything. So if something wasn't used and was cut from the film, later he would say, 'Remember that table or this set we didn't use, maybe we can use it here.'"
Sets measured up to 30-40 feet across, particularly with the huge, countryside vistas required by the script. In that regard Lowry says he was aided by the use of different size puppets, some as small as a centimeter high, which allowed the building of scaled-down sets that would have been too prohibitively expensive to have been built to full size. "It afforded us to do much more epic landscapes, because all we had to do was switch to the smaller characters. For instance, Bean's annex, the area outside his farm, there's a shootout with the characters. We built a fairly large set, 25 feet long and 15 feet deep, it was in half scale, with half scale humans and micro animals, and immediately it looked like it was a 40-foot set. So it was a way for us to economically and physically do larger sets. But, those landscapes were such a challenge."
Particularly when one of Anderson's stipulations was that there be no green in the film. "The color palette is noteworthy because it was initially so restrictive," Lowry recalls. "It's all mustards and yellows and reds and beiges. It was very odd going into it because we had to represent a lot of different things that would be not in that color range, but in the end we found a pretty good formula, so things that would be green ended up being beige or ochre. Having said, there are a lot of other colors in the film, but he drove us in that way to such an extent that the film looks very autumnal. It really glows.
"It's a very storybook, made up, strange world," Lowry continues, proud of what his team achieved. "I think it's quite charming. Again the level of detail enhances the experience of looking at it. There's so much to see it in. It's profoundly unique. It doesn't remind me of anything, except maybe a Wes Anderson movie. There's also a bit of oddness, but it's an accessible oddness. It's what gives the movie charm. It is intense in a way. It's a singular vision and anything that's a singular vision is powerful."

PUPPETS
To flesh out Lowry's team's character designs into fully realized three-dimensional creations, the production approached acclaimed puppet makers Ian MacKinnon and Peter Saunders whose credits include CORPSE BRIDE as well as countless television shows and commercials. Based in Manchester, England, MacKinnon and Saunders were charged with creating a series of puppets in what is termed "hero scale", which is the standard puppet size used by stop-motion animators because of its versatility of movement and ability to handle the largest variety of facial expressions. Ranging in size from a couple of inches (in the case of Rickety the mouse), up to eighteen inches (for Rat), these "hero scale" puppets were sculpted over armatures -- movable metal skeletons made typically from steel or aluminium with ball and socket joints -- that allow the animators to position them as required.
Once MacKinnon and Saunders had completed their work, this first batch of puppets became the subject of further design changes as Anderson and the animators then set about refining and, in some cases, redesigning the characters based on their look or animatability.
"It's still evolving heavily at that point," says puppet fabrication supervisor Andy Gent, who worked on CORPSE BRIDE and CORALINE. "We had to change the shapes on the puppets, on the shoulders and some of their profiles, and then redo the costumes because none of the costumes would work. So there was an awful lot of redesigning and finding new materials."
Unlike most stop-motion puppets which are normally made from silicon or plasticine over a ball and socket armature, a large number of the characters in FANTASTIC MR. FOX, by virtue of being animals, needed to be covered in fur.
As with props, every item of clothing for the puppets had to be manufactured to Anderson's precise instructions. The corduroy and tweed suits worn by Mr. Fox were based on suits that Anderson wears himself. "We got swatch samples from his tailor so we could match the color," Abbate reveals.
Mrs. Fox's dress took a little more time to get right. "Unlike most animated movies where you sketch the characters and the dress would be part of the sculpt, here Wes designed the clothes like you would for an actress or a model," recalls Abbate. "But the first dress we made didn't look that great on her. It was fine as a drawing but it didn't work with the puppet's hips, shoulders and torso, and so the puppet costumers had to become like costume designers and go, how can we fit this dress on her? She's Meryl Streep after all. She needs something beautiful."
For Rat, Anderson wanted a striped, knitted sweater. A simple enough request you might think, except someone not only has to actually knit it, but has to knit it with knitting needles of an appropriate size.
"You have to make the knitting needles to start with before you can actually fabricate the material you're going to make the sweater out of," notes Gent of the immense amount of worked involved in bringing FANTASTIC MR. FOX to life. "We made a tiny little badge for the jumper which went through a few versions, but in the end Wes was absolutely keen to get a hand-embroidered badge where the letters were two-and-a-half millimeters high. It's that incredible detail that gives us all the richness. So there's an awful lot of work to get to that stage."
Once Anderson and the animators signed off on the "hero scale" puppets, Gent's team then moved on to making smaller versions of each character in a variety of scales. In addition to "hero scale", puppets were made in three sizes, "half scale", "mini" and "micro-mini", with the latter only 12-20 millimetres in height. "The small ones were the revelation," says Abbate. "They rocked our world a little bit."
"They've been able to give us the really big wide scenes where we couldn't have physically built a set that big, as it would take up the entire studio," Gent explains. "We built really small versions, gave them enough to keep them alive, wire arms and legs. Because we couldn't give them mechanics, which we did on the other scales, they had a certain charm of their own which Wes really liked."
Initially, Gent says, the "minis" and "micro-minis" were intended simply for wide shots but soon Anderson wanted to use them more and more, and use them closer and closer to camera, which meant redesigning them. "When we first looked at the small scale Mr. Fox, the brief was something with cardboard box bodies, very angular heads and little wire arms and legs, so they looked like they were toys," he explains. "We tested them and they looked fantastic but it was quite a jolt from the hero-scale character to that look. We went through two or three versions until we arrived at something which you knew was Mr. Fox, but you knew it was a slightly smaller version. Obviously it couldn't move its eyes, open and close its mouth, it's not furred, it's sculptured, so it has a certain amount of the look of a tin soldier, that naïveté. But when you see it in the context of the set, it has a really nice charm to it."
With four main scales of puppets, countless costume changes and 18 different looks for Mr. Fox alone, Gent estimates his team made in the region of 500 puppets in total, about 150 of them "hero scale". It was, he admits, a massive undertaking, but it was only part of their job.
Throughout the year-long shoot, Gent's team, which, at its peak, numbered 25, also had to service, repair and maintain all the puppets, operating out of a workshop that was dubbed "the puppet hospital" by the production and was a favorite destination for people visiting the set.
It was, inevitably, the micro and micro-minis that took most punishment. "Some only lasted one or two shots," Gent explains. "The hero scale ones pretty much last the whole show and all we did was replace skins when they got torn. Some we can't repair beyond a certain point, so they just had fresh faces, fresh fingers, but their actual costumes and bodies lasted from start to finish."

MacKINNON and SAUNDERS (Puppets Fabricated by) are based in the UK, who design and build high quality animation puppets, models and maquettes.
MacKinnon and Saunders produce TV commercials and entertainment programs for children's TV (the new cartoon series "Frankenstein's Cat" aired on CBBC and BBC1 in 2008).
MacKinnon and Saunders offer various digital services including Maya Unlimited 3D.
Past and present clients include HOT Animation, Future Films, Passion Pictures, Warner Bros., Loose Moose, Cosgrove Hall, Aardman Animations, Publicis New York, Nickelodeon UK, Disney, Tiger Aspect, Barry Purves and Famous Flying Films.




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