Vanity Fair Movie Blog E-Mail Print RSS Share Yahoo! Buzz * Costumes How the Puppets from Fantastic Mr. Fox Were Made [Slideshow] by Julian Sancton November 13, 2009, 10:00 AM fox-top.jpg Once Wes Anderson had decided that his sixth feature film would be a stop-motion animation version of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. 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. 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. 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. But despite their experience, they found Anderson’s project to be particularly daunting. “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. “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.” Most baffling for the animators and puppet makers alike was Anderson’s insistence on naiveté. 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. 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. Herky-jerkiness didn’t bother him. On the contrary, he sought it out. 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.