Stop Motion Animation Only The Wes Anderson Way

Stop Motion Animation Only The Wes Anderson Way

Navin and I are Wes Anderson fans through and through. Granted, I’ve only seen one of his movies, and Navin’s only seen two, but there is something very charming about the eccentric sets and perfect music and impeccable detail. Perhaps the famous director is best known for his quaint live action comedies (like The Grand Budapest Hotel) but I loved his stop motion film Fantastic Mr. Fox. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean! The detail is beyond impressive – he manages to preserve the elements that make his movies special even in the stop motion medium. How does he manage this seemingly impossible task? The movie was created scene by scene using handcrafted puppets. Every frame is shot individually by moving the puppets a fraction of an inch. Details that seem small take hours to film – like when the fox’s whiskers blow in the wind! Stop motion animation has not been the most popular form of animation throughout history; the supposed first instance of stop motion was a 1898 film by

J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith. Classics soon followed however; with Gumby in 1955 and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in 1964. My classmates and I watched The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) one year at school. But Wes Anderson’s trailblazing remake of a classic novel is indubitably my favorite! In March 2018, Anderson followed up The Grand Budapest Hotel with smashing hit (and yet another stop motion) Isle of Dogs. It’s next on my watch list