This is the armature for the character of Ash, Mr. MacKinnon and Saunders's team constructed steel, ball-and-socket armatures, which are like articulated skeletons that allow the animators to control the characters’ movements with extreme precision. From left: plastiline models of Badger's body, Badger's head, and Kylie's body. Sculptors and MacKinnon and Saunders began by fleshing out Haymoz's designs into three dimensions using plastiline clay. (See a few examples, as well as images of the entire creation process, in the slideshow below.)Ī preliminary character design for Badger, by Félicie Haymoz. We took pictures of all the people in the studios who were wearing glasses and sent them to Wes.” In the end, Haymoz created about 15 drawings for each of 40 characters. At some point, everything was right except for the glasses. for others, such as Petey, it took a long time. “For the rat, for example, Wes just picked the first one I did. “Sometimes it took a while to figure out exactly what Wes wanted,” Haymoz told me over gchat. He chose to shoot on “twos,” which means that each frame is doubled so that there are effectively 12 frames per second, instead of a more fluid 24. He instead wanted viewers to notice and embrace the medium of stop-motion itself, which had enchanted him as a child, especially in holiday shorts such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. He didn’t want his film to look as slick as, say, The Corpse Bride or Coraline, which are so smooth as to look computer-animated. Most baffling for the animators and puppet makers alike was Anderson’s insistence on naiveté. “I think the fact that he hadn't worked a great deal in stop motion pushed us out of our comfort zone, which forced us to try new ideas, new techniques, and new materials.” “Wes had a very clear idea of what he wanted, and I think he made us challenge all our preconceptions about what stop-motion puppets are,” says Peter Saunders.
But despite their experience, they found Anderson’s project to be particularly daunting. Since then, they’ve collaborated on countless television commercials and on some of the most successful stop-motion feature films in memory, including Nick Park’s Chicken Run, Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride, and Henry Selick’s Coraline. Based in Manchester, Ian MacKinnon and Peter Saunders first teamed up 22 years ago on a stop-motion version of The Wind in the Willows. Fox, about a raffish fox who outsmarts three evil farmers, he called on some of the best names in the puppet-making business to put his characteristically precise vision to life. Once Wes Anderson had decided that his sixth feature film would be a stop-motion animation version of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr.
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