Anderson found himself being more hands-on with the animation process than he anticipated. “I expected that I was going to get everything figured out and hand it over to the team of animators,” he remembers. “I thought I would go direct another movie during that time.
But I realized pretty early on that I wasn’t going to be happy with the movie that way. If I was going to put in all that work in the first place, I should keep going and get it just how I want it.”
Over the course of his career, Wes Anderson has established a very specific style of filmmaking — whether he wanted to or not. “Something that I’m not quite able to regulate comes through, I suppose,” he admits.
And even when he tries to get away from his previous work, like with his last film, “the Darjeeling Limited,” he can’t escape the Wes Anderson-ness of his work. “A lot of people said, ‘I can see this is a lot like your other movies,’” he remembers. “And I felt like, but we’ve gone to India. We’re on a train. It’s totally different.”
True to form, Anderson’s latest, a stop-motion animation adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” has that certain something that makes it indisputably a Wes Anderson movie, as much as he tried to avoid it. “My goal was to try to make it as Dahl as possible,” the director says. But his touch is unmistakable — and with good reason, as Anderson felt a personal connection to the story.
“This was the first book that I legally owned that was my property,” he says. “I still have it, and it still has a little plate in it with my name from the school book fair.”