Wes and the Fox

Picture a glittered imagination - scattered pink, yellow, and blue veins in the brain, boiling like witches glue over an open fire of microphones and computer graphic applications - of punky robustness and a cartoon swag.  You are funny and deadpan is a word of inspiration, a magnet to your fridge.  You are Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited).  Cooler than cool.

Dazed & Confused nabs a stellar spread and interview with the acclaimed director for their November issue, turning heads on 23rd Street and making minds beg to be a part of his world (or at least mine).  With the upcoming Fantastic Mr. Fox, released in theaters on November 13, Wes talks about his process in film, sound, design and animation, imagination, and reveals how you can still maintain both on an even scale.  As a society prone to un-imaginative programming, jobs, politics and lyrics, we might want to pay attention.

"Writing, for me, is usually just following a train of thought - imagining a scene or setting.  When I'm writing, I'm probably doing that for five hours a day.  Once Mr. Fox was written, I didn't have a preconception of what it would look like.  Instead, there's a process, working with our production designer Nelson Lowry and with Tristan Oliver and figuring out how it ought to look.  So it's almost like you're creating something from your imagination, but your imagination is aided by actually making these things and then saying,'And now we add a little of this, a little of that...'  I don't know if that is exactly imagination or if that is some other process.  We're dreaming up what we want the movie to look like visually, not by just closing our eyes and thinking of it, but by painting it, by building things and adjusting them."

Sly 

Delighted

Sad

Astonished

[4 fox faces in an auburn sketch, non-the-less mischievous. ]

Watch the trailer below:

A fantastical playground that's (sorry Disney) OK to be what it's not.

What with Where the Wild Things, Alice in Wonderland, and now Berenstain Bears I might as well move back home and hang some Piglet wallpaper again.