Wes Anderson, the director and writer of the outstanding 2009 stop motion film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, as well as several highly revered live action films such as The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Moonrise Kingdom (among others), has announced his newest film, entitled Isle of Dogs, which will be his ninth feature film to direct and his second stop motion movie.
Not much has been released explaining many of the details of the story of Isle of Dogs, although a synopsis of the film was released via the Isle of Dogs Twitter account:
From this, combined with the original concept art, the frustratingly few details Wes releases in his video announcing the film, and the new poster for the film, we can conclude several things: one, the film will have a Japanese-element to it. (Further evidence for this comes from the fact that several of the voice actors credited for the film are Japanese actors.) Secondly, many of the main characters in the movie will be dogs and they will most likely be anthropomorphic canines (as actors have been slated to play dog characters). Thirdly, something else we can also count on is that the film will contain the same Wes Anderson humor and trademark directorial style. Although other than these few givens, there is little else we can be certain of, which leaves plenty of room for us to be amazed in the upcoming months as more material gets released as we get closer to the release date of the film, which is currently set to come to North American theaters April 20, 2018.
Several a-list actors have also been announced to voice characters in the film, including: Bryan Cranston, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, F. Murray Abraham, and Tilda Swinton (among others).
Now this film was announced during my recent, two-year long hiatus from writing the blog, back in February. Wes announced this film via participating in a sweepstakes through the site Crowdrise, with the prize being that you could potentially voice one of the characters in the Isle of Dogs film and visit the set and workshops in London to see the animation in-progress – a unique and a very Wes Anderson way of announcing such a project. The proceeds to the campaign will go towards Martin Scorsese’s non-profit organization, The Film Foundation, whose cause is to work to protect and preserve motion picture history. You can learn more about the sweepstakes and the organization by going here.
What I found the most interesting in this announcement was the video in which Wes announced the film and the sweepstakes. During the video, actor Edward Norton pokes his head out from behind a wall in the background, framed in the shot in a style that is very familiar to anyone who has seen any of Wes Anderson’s films. A dialogue soon ensues between Wes and Edward, during which Wes reveals a sneak-peak clip of the design of the puppet of Edward Norton’s character in the film, a dog named Rex.
Even before beginning pre-production on Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes was no stranger to the craft of stop motion. He elaborates a little on his earliest impression of stop motion in “The Making of Fantastic Mr. Fox” book, “The thing I’ve always loved with stop-motion, more than anything else, is puppets that have fur, and actually not only that. I also like the fighting skeletons in, maybe it’s Jason and the Argonauts, or maybe it’s one of the Sinbad movies where they have fighting skeletons. But I have always liked – I love the way King Kong, the old King Kong, looked, with his fur – the animators call it ‘boiling.’ And for some reason, the whole magical aspect of stop-motion was one of those things where you can see the trick…that magical effect where you can see how it is accomplished – where at one and the same time you are enchanted by the trick to the effect and by the story itself. I have no idea why this concept means so much to me.”
Reading this and several other quotes throughout the interview with him in the making-of book, one really gets the feel that Wes has a true love for stop motion which comes from the feeling that comes with the authenticity of handmade, stop motion scenes, which throws in sharp contrast the very sleek appeal of the majority of CGI effects. Wes’s passion is something which the general attitude in Hollywood would at least seem to consider too old-fashioned, giving those of us who love the craft of stop motion someone so fortunately highly esteemed inside of the film business who shares our same passion for the craft.
According to this Huffington Post article, as well as “The Making of Fantastic Mr. Fox” book, Wes’s first use of stop motion in one of his films can be seen in the climax of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, where a jaguar shark – who earlier in the film kills the best friend and companion of the title character of the film (portrayed by Bill Murray) – swims by Steve Zissou and his companions while they watch the undersea creature from a deep-dive submarine. According to the Huffington Post, Anderson had this to say about the stop motion elements of the scene, “The puppet of the shark — it’s a stop-motion puppet — was very big. Henry Selick, who was doing the animation, said it was and is the largest stop-motion puppet anybody ever made,” Although the article goes on to say that Wes apparently had no idea what happened to the puppet after the scene was shot.
Life Aquatic was not Wes’s only live action film that employed the use of stop motion effects. His latest film to date, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), included a thrilling chase scene on a ski slope that was made using stop motion. The blog on the site of the professional frame-grabbing software Dragonframe published an article several years ago, around the time of the film’s release, that included an exclusive making-of video, numerous behind-the-scenes pictures of the sets and puppets used for the scene, and an interview with the puppet fabricator for the stop motion scene – Andy Gent and Andy Biddle (both of whom worked on Fantastic Mr. Fox) – the scene’s lead animator, who were both working at London’s Clapham Road Studios at the time to produce the scene for the film. The interview goes into the designers’ experiences working with Wes, down to adapting to his very particular eye for a scene which he communicated to them over email.
Now we only have to wait and see when the next tidbit from this wonderful project will be released, and we have little under a year before it will grace our screens. Until then, stayed tuned for updates.
You can stay tuned for the upcoming interviews and articles by subscribing to Stop Motion Geek via the “subscribe” button at the top right corner of our homepage, or by following us on Facebook @StopMotionGeek, or by visiting https://www.facebook.com/StopMotionGeek/. You can also stay up-to-date with the blog by following us on Instagram or @stop.motion.geek.blog.
Not much has been released explaining many of the details of the story of Isle of Dogs, although a synopsis of the film was released via the Isle of Dogs Twitter account:
Set in Japan, Isle of Dogs follows a boy’s odyssey in search of his dog.
From this, combined with the original concept art, the frustratingly few details Wes releases in his video announcing the film, and the new poster for the film, we can conclude several things: one, the film will have a Japanese-element to it. (Further evidence for this comes from the fact that several of the voice actors credited for the film are Japanese actors.) Secondly, many of the main characters in the movie will be dogs and they will most likely be anthropomorphic canines (as actors have been slated to play dog characters). Thirdly, something else we can also count on is that the film will contain the same Wes Anderson humor and trademark directorial style. Although other than these few givens, there is little else we can be certain of, which leaves plenty of room for us to be amazed in the upcoming months as more material gets released as we get closer to the release date of the film, which is currently set to come to North American theaters April 20, 2018.
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| Isle of Dogs poster. |
Several a-list actors have also been announced to voice characters in the film, including: Bryan Cranston, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, F. Murray Abraham, and Tilda Swinton (among others).
Now this film was announced during my recent, two-year long hiatus from writing the blog, back in February. Wes announced this film via participating in a sweepstakes through the site Crowdrise, with the prize being that you could potentially voice one of the characters in the Isle of Dogs film and visit the set and workshops in London to see the animation in-progress – a unique and a very Wes Anderson way of announcing such a project. The proceeds to the campaign will go towards Martin Scorsese’s non-profit organization, The Film Foundation, whose cause is to work to protect and preserve motion picture history. You can learn more about the sweepstakes and the organization by going here.
What I found the most interesting in this announcement was the video in which Wes announced the film and the sweepstakes. During the video, actor Edward Norton pokes his head out from behind a wall in the background, framed in the shot in a style that is very familiar to anyone who has seen any of Wes Anderson’s films. A dialogue soon ensues between Wes and Edward, during which Wes reveals a sneak-peak clip of the design of the puppet of Edward Norton’s character in the film, a dog named Rex.
A Brief History of Wes’s Stop Motion Work:
Reading this and several other quotes throughout the interview with him in the making-of book, one really gets the feel that Wes has a true love for stop motion which comes from the feeling that comes with the authenticity of handmade, stop motion scenes, which throws in sharp contrast the very sleek appeal of the majority of CGI effects. Wes’s passion is something which the general attitude in Hollywood would at least seem to consider too old-fashioned, giving those of us who love the craft of stop motion someone so fortunately highly esteemed inside of the film business who shares our same passion for the craft.
According to this Huffington Post article, as well as “The Making of Fantastic Mr. Fox” book, Wes’s first use of stop motion in one of his films can be seen in the climax of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, where a jaguar shark – who earlier in the film kills the best friend and companion of the title character of the film (portrayed by Bill Murray) – swims by Steve Zissou and his companions while they watch the undersea creature from a deep-dive submarine. According to the Huffington Post, Anderson had this to say about the stop motion elements of the scene, “The puppet of the shark — it’s a stop-motion puppet — was very big. Henry Selick, who was doing the animation, said it was and is the largest stop-motion puppet anybody ever made,” Although the article goes on to say that Wes apparently had no idea what happened to the puppet after the scene was shot.
Life Aquatic was not Wes’s only live action film that employed the use of stop motion effects. His latest film to date, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), included a thrilling chase scene on a ski slope that was made using stop motion. The blog on the site of the professional frame-grabbing software Dragonframe published an article several years ago, around the time of the film’s release, that included an exclusive making-of video, numerous behind-the-scenes pictures of the sets and puppets used for the scene, and an interview with the puppet fabricator for the stop motion scene – Andy Gent and Andy Biddle (both of whom worked on Fantastic Mr. Fox) – the scene’s lead animator, who were both working at London’s Clapham Road Studios at the time to produce the scene for the film. The interview goes into the designers’ experiences working with Wes, down to adapting to his very particular eye for a scene which he communicated to them over email.
Now we only have to wait and see when the next tidbit from this wonderful project will be released, and we have little under a year before it will grace our screens. Until then, stayed tuned for updates.
You can stay tuned for the upcoming interviews and articles by subscribing to Stop Motion Geek via the “subscribe” button at the top right corner of our homepage, or by following us on Facebook @StopMotionGeek, or by visiting https://www.facebook.com/StopMotionGeek/. You can also stay up-to-date with the blog by following us on Instagram or @stop.motion.geek.blog.
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