"There's three grabbers, three taggers, five twig runners, and a player at Whackbat. Center tagger lights a pine cone and chucks it over the basket and the whack-batter tries to hit the cedar stick off the cross rock. Then the twig runners dash back and forth until the pine cone burns out and the umpire calls hotbox. Finally, you count up however many score-downs it adds up to and divide that by nine."
I posted a couple of links at the end of the Corpse Bride Review and I had a thought that some people might miss them, so I'll put it in a separate post.
Director: Wes Anderson
The film has an all star cast of voice actors including George Clooney as Mr Fox, Meryl Streep as Mrs Fox, Owen Wilson as Coach Skip and Willem Dafoe as Rat. These famous actors really add to the character's personality, for example George Clooney's voice adds the suave charisma that is needed to portray the sly Mr Fox. 'The humour is often dry, even ironic, while the look of the film- all reds and browns and at once convincingly realistic and ultra absurd-is perhaps its greatest strength.'2
Wes Anderson has visually tried to make this stop animation look like it has jumped off of the page. The set design and colour palette is absolutely stunning, each scene looks like you could frame it and hang it up on your wall. It is a beautiful film right down to the carefully composed, symmetrical framing, the almost theatrical depth of field, and the colourful, choreographed movements.
Shot digitally using a Nikon D3, which offers a significantly higher resolution than even that of full High Definition. It was also shot at a frame rate of 12 frames per second, rather than the more fluid 24, so that viewers would notice the medium of stop-motion itself. Making a stop animation is a very pain staking process as Andy Biddle, an animator for the film, says:'Any animated film is quite painstaking. If you ask an animator how much footage they do in a day, it depends on the production, but for Fantastic Mr Fox, it was about 4 seconds of footage a day. The style that Wes[Anderson] wanted was quite fast and character-based action. It was quite involved.'4
The puppets themselves are gorgeously made, and the individual hairs on each of the animals shows the pain staking amount of work that went into making each puppet. 'The human characters' hair was actual human hair collected from studio employees at MacKinnon & Saunders, the company that manufactured the puppets for the film.'3 And the animal hair was collected from goats, due to how well it dyes, the strength it has and how good it looks when lit.In the end there were 100 people working on making the puppets and eventually about 530 puppets were made. The reason for so many puppets were that they made the puppets to 6 different scale, some for up close and others to interact with the humans.
Nobody can deny that Wes Anderson took on a huge task here, turning a much loved childrens book into a full length stop animation. From the frequent laughter from the cinema, I think it has definitely been a success, appealing to adults and children alike. He hasn't ruined the original and has created something that is beautiful and lovable.
Directed By: Tim Burton and Mike Johnson
The film was made using stop animation, a technique used to make objects appear as if they are moving by themselves. This is done by photographing the object between small movements which creates the illusion of movement when the images are played in a sequence. Corpse Bride is ground breaking in many different ways. Firstly it is the first feature to use digital SLR photography (31 Canon EOS-1Ds MARK II SLR cameras with Nikon Lenses) instead of film cameras. It is also the first full length feature to use Apple's Final Cut Pro.
The actual shooting part of the production is the most arduous part of the whole process. Editor Johnathan Lucas says;
"After doing The Nightmare Before Christmas, I was looking for something else to do in the same medium, because I love the stop-motion medium. A friend of mine gave me a little short story, a couple of paragraphs from an old folk tale. It captured my attention and seemed right for this particular type of animation. It’s such a special medium. It’s like casting––you like to marry the medium with the material. And this seemed like a good match.
I’ve always loved stop-motion animation. What’s nice about it is that it’s so tactile. Our Corpse Bride puppets are beautifully made and our animators are amazing. There’s something wonderful about being able to physically touch and move the characters, and to see their world actually exist. It’s similar to making a live action film; if you’re doing it all on blue screen, it doesn’t give you the feeling of actually being there, which the stop-motion process does.
My love for stop-motion started with Ray Harryhausen. One of the beautiful things about Harryhausen’s work is that no matter what it is that he was doing you always felt there was an artist at work behind it; you always felt someone’s personality. It’s like bringing an inanimate object to life. It’s moving a three-dimensional object frame by frame, and you think, “Wow, there’s something really beautiful and old-fashioned, hand-made and artistic about that.” To me, there’s something very special about that.
You can do beautiful work on a computer and you can do beautiful hand-drawn animation. All of it has its own quality. But there’s just something special to me about the stop-motion medium."3
