Fantastic Mr. Fox

Preparing a couple of short lectures about Wes Anderson's first stop-motion feature Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) I've analyzed all of the director's previous live-action films during the course of which I gained so much excess material that I've decided to post it on the blog. It's become a six-part series with two additional posts which you can now easily access through this page.
The posts themselves are rather lengthy, I'm afraid, but there are lots of pictures to illustrate the analysis.

The Book (1/5): This short introduction compares Donald Chaffin's original book illustrations to the final film.

Inspiration (2/5): Here, I try to assemble a fragmentary meandering on referenced sources, some of them cited as inspiration by the director, some of them my own guess-work.

A Wes Anderson Family Film (3/5): Family themes and dysfunctional father-son-relationships are central to Anderson's films. His characters often look as if they were a part of the rooms they inhabit.

Links and Thanks: There's another five-part analysis of Anderson's previous films by Matt Zoller Seitz.

Flat Staging and Camera Moves (4/5): Anderson's visual style has become very rigid with near-geometric compositions and formalized camera moves that enforce a certain dollhouse esthetics.

Prolific Limitations: Understated Acting (5/5) Part I: Laconic acting and dialogue delivery has been a part of Anderson's style from the beginning. Here it is taken one step further and visualizes the internal conflicts by the unique means of animation.

Gray Balance:  An article about how neutral colors affect our perception of colors and about color constancy. There is a central Mr. Fox example.

Prolific Limitations: Autumn Colors (5/5) Part II: Here, I will look at how the autumn colors are balanced by gray and where that leaves blue and green which according to the publicity interviews were banned from the film. There is a summary of the whole series at the very end.

PS: Blogger seems to have changed the post layouts so that the picture captions now look the same as the normal text which is rather annoying. I apologize for any inconveniences that result from this.