Fantastic Mr Fox Puppets

Once Wes Anderson had decide that he wanted the next film he directed to be a stop motion animation, he called some of the best puppet makers in the world. Ian MacKinnon and Peter Saunders (the puppet makers) had taken part in making many stop motion films and commercials together such as Chicken Run, Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride, and Henry Selick’s Coraline.

Although they had plenty of experience, they found what Anderson was asking for was quite the “challenge”. Because Anderson had no experience in stop motion, it pushed the puppet makers out of their “comfort zone”. They had to try “new ideas, new technique and new materials.”

MacKinnon and Saunders based the puppets off of extremely detailed drawings by Félicie Haymoz, a young Belgian character designer. Anderson told the young designer that Mr. Fox needed to be a combination of Roald Dahl, Rex Harrison, George Clooney and “a stuffed fox". Haymoz had said that in some cases, it took a long time to arrive at a drawing that Anderson was happy with. In the case of the rat character, Anderson liked the first draft and stuck with it. But in other cases, like with the case of the character peter, at one point he was happy with everything except his glasses and so Haymoz had to spend more time working on just the glasses. In the end, Haymoz made about 15 drawings for each of the 40 characters.