Finally watched Fantastic Mr. Fox. (Yeah, I know, I tend to be a bit outdated) Borrowed it from the uni library, I guess that's one of the good things about being in art school, you can do fun stuff and call it studying. As a side note, I'm trying to catch up watching and reading all the 'classic' stuff that everyone has to see, like novels, comic books and movies. Recently finished reading Lord of the Flies.Also watched the first Star Wars movie for an assignment, and plan to finish watching the whole series. Hmm...all animators seem to be geeks who worship the very DVD that the Star Wars movies are burnt onto, and can recite everything that happens in every shot of every scene of every episode. But me, I know nothing about it. I can name a few characters. And I think the concept art is cool *thumbs up*. Um...that's all.

Anyway, back to the main story. Fox is based on a book by Roald Dahl, of course, but you'd notice that a lot of the content makes you wonder "wow...how did they translate that from words to picture?" I haven't read the book, but based on the interviews in the DVD (I'm starting to like special features sections) the story was actually quite short, so a lot of content was added. Which is really good, I think, because it's all in Roald Dahl's sweet and sarcastic style, so you never notice the difference.

The animation was a bit jerky, but I thought that was ok. Apparently they were aiming for a more old school King Kong kind of feel, and the stop motion animation was done in a more manual way. Not sure what that means,though. The rippling fur effect(caused by the animators touching the puppets) was used well, there were parts where the fur was still, when it should be, and then there were parts where the puppets need not have been moved by the animators, yet the fur was still intentionally disturbed a bit to make it look like wind was blowing.It's kind of nice when people leave in the flaws of a certain medium that makes it unique.Was pretty impressed that they managed to pull off human character animation as well, and it didn't look rubber-zombie freaky.

The art direction was pretty good too, especially the backgrounds, which kind of remind me of colour pencil childrens' book illustrations, in a charming, simple way. The voice acting was good. The acting for animation was wonderful, lots of small gestures and expressions that make the animation look really natural. Umm...can't think of anything bad to say about the movie.Oh yeah, the rat was annoying.But he was kind of a minor character anyway.