Yahoo Lifestyle How Working in Animation Made Wes Anderson the Director He Is Today
Wes Anderson doesn’t talk a lot about his work in animation. Frankly, the more famous he gets, the less Anderson seems to enjoy doing interviews, which is why it was such a treat to sit down with the director of “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Isle of Dogs” at the Annecy Animation Film Festival last summer.
Over the course of a 90-minute master class, Anderson discussed what drew him to stop motion, how coming to the medium from a place of naiveté resulted in such distinctive-looking movies, and how animation in turn has informed his subsequent live-action work.
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Unlike a number of other filmmakers, from Guillermo del Toro to Jacques Demy, who started out making rudimentary stop-motion films as kids, “I didn’t have any real ambition to do an animated movie until I’d made a few live-action movies,” Anderson explained. “It was something I sort of found my way into.”
Now that he’s done it, Anderson considers himself hooked. “I definitely would like to do another,” he said, just not right away.
“The thing that happens is … by the time you finish a phase of what you’re doing, you’re very happy to move on. You don’t usually say, ‘I’d like to spend another year in the cutting room,’” Anderson said. “I love the experience of doing a stop-motion movie. Each time, by the time I’ve finished it, I want to go off and do a live-action movie.”
Anderson’s first foray into stop motion was for a limited sequence in “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” which was loosely inspired by the life of Jacques Cousteau — although he corrected a faulty assumption on my part. There’s an iconic shot of the Belafonte, in which we see a cross-section of the research boat featured in the film. No part of that sequence is animated.
These days, Anderson works with Simon Weisse, who is among the world’s leading experts in miniatures. But in the case of “Life Aquatic,” the ship was real — one of two mine sweepers the crew found in South Africa and transported up to Italy. “It’s a great big giant set, built on Stage 5 at Cinecitta, Fellini’s stage.”
As for the dolphins seen swimming beneath the boat, “They should have been animated, but in fact, they’re robots,” said Anderson, who’d never had such resources to work with — and still managed to go about $10 million and 20 days over budget.
“There are easier ways to do these things,” he said. “I’d seen something where some people were doing these robotic sea creatures, and I thought, ‘We’ll get those.’”
As it turns out, “They’re very hard to work with. First, they’re not that readily available, and then you’ve got to have the special robotic dolphin guys, which is a whole team of people.”
Where Anderson did wind up using stop motion was in depicting the exotic species Zissou and his crew observe at sea. “What we thought was: We can’t compete with the real, documentary undersea life that is out there in the world. We are not divers, and we’re not gonna get the best material of that. What we could do that’s different is we could invent our own animals, and that was partly was what led to being stop-motion was we wanted to do wildlife that doesn’t really exist.”
So he hired Henry Selick, the acclaimed director of “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” to oversee the stop-motion segments of the film, including the largest stop-motion puppet ever built: the mythic Jaguar Shark.
“Henry was animating far away from me while we were shooting the movie,” explained Anderson, who began to dream about making an entirely stop-motion feature.
“Quickly I thought of this book that I had received as a present when I was 7 years old or something,” he recalled, referring to Roald Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” To get permission, Anderson arranged to meet Dahl’s widow. “She was always very careful about who she would let do the stories, so I kind of had to audition.”
In the end, Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach were allowed to visit Gypsy House, the cottage where Dahl did his writing (as seen in “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”), which informed the design of the film.
A lifelong fan of Rankin/Bass TV specials like “Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer,” Anderson hoped to enlist Selick on a similar-looking project. Unfortunately for him, the “James and Giant Peach” director had landed at Laika, where he was developing “Coraline.” According to Anderson, it was Selick who introduced him to Mark Gustafson (many years later, an Oscar winner for “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”).
“Mark is the director of animation of the movie, but he was also kind of my educator for how to go about doing this,” Anderson acknowledged. “It took me quite a lot of time to learn how an animated movie is done, and I learned it from my collaborators, who were some of the best people in the world at making this kind of movie.”
One thing about doing this master class in Annecy, so many of the people who worked with Anderson on “Fantastic Mr. Fox” come to the festival each year, and they weren’t shy about sharing stories of how challenging the production was.
For his part, Anderson admitted, “My ideas for how to go about making the movie were probably unconventional in ways I didn’t realize … and so I ended up doing a lot of things that made it a lot more difficult.”
Instead of working from storyboards, he and Baumbach wrote the script as they would a live-action film. Then Anderson had the idea of recording the voices on a farm (the cast features George Clooney and Meryl Streep as Mr. and Mrs. Fox).
“I guess people thought that was a bad idea because we weren’t going to get clean recordings,” he said. “With stop motion, it’s very much about bringing to life the performance.”
The main complaint that still arises among those involved in the making of “Fantastic Mr. Fox” was the way Anderson directed the film from afar.
“I think the group was surprised at how little I was there, but how much I wanted to guide it. It’s one thing to not be there and to just check in and say ‘good’ and ‘here’s a few suggestions,’ but it’s another thing to control it all from your e-mail,” Anderson said. “It wasn’t my plan. It was just what evolved, and I think it took time for people to trust me.”
Stop motion is so time-consuming — days of manipulating puppets one frame at a time for a few seconds of footage — that no animator wants to do reshoots. When working in live-action, however, Anderson is a director who likes to do a lot of takes.
“I mean, I’m known for saying, ‘Good, good, just one more,’ but I say that again and again and again and again and again, whereas with a stop-motion movie, you essentially do one take,” said Anderson, who implemented a technique others tend to use more sparingly.
“You can do cutbacks,” he said. “On the days where it starts to go in the wrong direction, you may make a choice to go back to where we were the previous day. It’s a tricky thing, because sometimes that is actually interfering with the animator in a way they can’t entirely recover from, which I didn’t know at first. I thought, ‘Let’s just fix that. We were great up to here.’ But sometimes they have to flow through it because they’re not computers, and what they’re making is something organic.”
One of Anderson’s most unconventional decisions — early on, at least — was to embrace what is called “boiling,” where “the fur is just dancing around on its own. I think that it was considered a bit amateurish to have this kind of look,” Anderson said. “I like the look of it [because] I know what it is: It’s people’s fingers touching these things.”
Likewise, Anderson explained, “I think my ideas about the lighting were anti-stop-motion, which I didn’t know.” He wanted a softer, flatter light that cinematographer Tristan Oliver (“Chicken Run”) found less than ideal for miniatures. “I think he felt like, ‘You’re asking me to light worse than I can do.’”
Eventually, the animators came around to his unconventional (and admittedly naive) vision. “There was a point when we’d been working six months or something like that, when we screened a section of the movie for the team,” Anderson said. “And there were some people on the team who only then said, ‘Oh, I see what we’re doing.’”
From then on, it was less of a struggle to convince the team to go along with his ideas. The crew shot “Fantastic Mr. Fox” on twos, meaning that animators reposition the puppets 12 times for every second of screentime — whereas “Isle of Dogs” (2018) was later done on ones, which comes out looking smoother, but is technically twice the work.
Around the same time, Anderson agreed to direct a short TV spot for Sony. The robot-filled result, which features an 8-year-old boy imagining how the company’s Xperia phones work, is unmistakably the work of the same creative mind who made “Rushmore.”
After “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Anderson went back to live action, but carried over a few of the tricks he’d learned in stop motion. “In a way, the stuff from animation was just a new set of ingredients to add into the mix,” said Anderson, who adopted the process of using animatics — or animated storyboards — to plan out shots on every film since, starting with “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012).
To promote the film, Anderson came up with an idea that involved hand-drawn animation (overseen by Christian De Vita). Bob Balaban, who narrates the film, hosts short “Reading Rainbow”-style segments, featuring some of the (made-up) books the Susie character reads in the movie. “For each one, the cover is illustrated by a different artist, some of them people very close to me, so we just thought we would do a little clip of each of those books.”
On his 2014 love-action film “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” Anderson actually decided to insert a stop-motion sequence where a set-piece was planned. “I had a very elaborate ski chase in mind for that film,” he said. “Our choices were to go completely James Bond and go up into the Alps and get some helicopters or to go this other route, which is … to design our own ski slopes. We did bigger shots and more elaborate things. So there’s less risk of death or injury to any of the people involved, and somehow it felt like it was right for the story.”
By this point, Anderson was ready to make another fully animated film, reassembling much of the “Fantastic Mr. Fox” team for 2018’s “Isle of Dogs.”
“The thing was, we were able to prepare it knowing what it’s like to make one of these [stop-motion films],” Anderson said. “I’ve learned how things are normally done and then we kind of made our own version of it. By the time we did ‘Isle of Dogs,’ we had our own system.”
On “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Andy Gent had been in charge of maintaining the puppets. “He was the boss of the puppet hospital. As the puppets go to work, they get destroyed, and he rebuilds them,” Anderson says. “When we got to ‘Isle of Dogs,’ we just had Andy make everything from the beginning. He was more the puppet guru from the start.” Anderson also tapped Gent to work on his live-action movies. “We had a road runner in ‘Asteroid City.’ Andy is responsible for that in every which way,” Anderson said. Gent also designed the alien, a huge puppet whose stop-motion performance was done by one of the lead animators on “Isle of Dogs,” Kim Keukeleire.
“The idea was just to make this scene come to life and affect the audience in something like the way it’s affecting the characters,” said Anderson. “And for me, I feel like I had this secret weapon, which was this animator.”
Anderson wasn’t thinking about whether the audience would be distracted by the use of stop motion. “I guess I like the charm of the handmade object in a movie. To me, there’s something about understanding what the magic trick is that adds a sort of authenticity to things,” said Anderson, who was going for something different with the 2D-animated chase sequence in “The French Dispatch.”
“It’s kind of inspired by classic French bandes dessinées [or graphic novels],” he explained. “There was a part of ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ where I thought we might do something like that, but this one, it seemed built into it.” To have attempted the car chase in live-action, “it would be two and a half or three weeks of shooting, and I think it would be compromised,” said Anderson, who also directed a hand-drawn music video for the Jarvis Cocker cover of Christophe’s “Aline.”
More recently, animation factors into Anderson’s four Roald Dahl shorts (for which Gent designed the rat in “The Rat Catcher”). He’s keen to make another stop-motion feature, pointing out that with his ever-growing ensemble of live-action collaborators, “animals are part of the reason to do it.”
Still, “to do another stop-motion movie and have an experience like I had during ‘Isle of Dogs,’ that I would do in a second,” Anderson said. “It’s a sort of giant, slightly overwhelming thing, but it’s very fun.”
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