Felicity DahlA favourite childhood read for millions since its publication forty years ago, Roald Dahl fans are in for a real treat, as Wes Anderson's labour of love graduates from the big screen to your screen.
As Roald Dahl's wife, Felicity, revealed, "It was the first book that Wes ever owned. He was given Fantastic Mr Fox and he adored it as a child."
Dahl's novel tells the story of Mr Fox, who, after being caught stealing chickens from the mean local farmers, is trapped in his underground home with shotgun and spade aimed at his door. It is up to Mr Fox, with a little help from his fellow animals, to come up with a cunning plan to outwit the farmers and find a way to provide food for his family and friends.
Felicity Dahl explains that the original slender volume has been beefed up with the extra storylines needed for a feature film. "I know they've changed the story a bit, but it's a very little book, and when you make a feature film you have to do that. I think Wes has really got that Dahl humour and darkness. I just think it's a masterpiece."
The writer's widow and the young director first met around ten years ago, when Wes Anderson was putting The Royal Tenenbaums together. Felicity Dahl was impressed by the well-mannered young man, who refused to answer his mobile phone – even though he was waiting for a crucial call from Disney. The two became good friends and Wes Anderson wrote the screenplay at Gipsy House – the Dahls' home in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire.
Having spent several weeks watching him immersed in Roald Dahl's world, Felicity Dahl says of Wes Anderson, "I think he felt Roald's presence enormously, and I think the descriptions in a lot of Roald's books he could recognise as being round this area."
"The original location search was done by Wes and I, a good year or so before the screenplay was written. It was a soaking, beastly day and we went all round the countryside in our gumboots and sou'westers...I think that was when he thought, 'yes, I've got to base it in Great Missenden.'"
The resulting landscapes of Fantastic Mr Fox feel to Felicity Dahl very like the area she knows so well, although she says with a laugh: "Boggis's, Bunce's and Bean's farms don't, but the countryside yes - there is so much detail of shops and the pub in the village. The Nag's Head is now on exhibition in the museum, the actual model of it that was made for the film.
"And the tree itself, which is known as the 'witches tree', in fact, was half way up our lane, and Roald always said that was where Mr Fox lived. It was rather tragic: the tree fell over two or three years ago and crashed to the ground - it was a 150-year-old beech tree - and Wes couldn't believe it."
Luckily, however, the director had had the chance to see it and take photographs of it and Felicity Dahl says, "He went all round the countryside here in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and developed little different buildings and scenes and quarries, because we've got flint quarries up in the wood and that fascinated him.
"We've got a shed in the garden, which was originally an old cow shed - it's known as the 'hairy hut' - and that was the one with all the twigs running across by the river bank that he used. So there were a lot of external things."
There were lots of things from inside too, as Felicity Dahl explains. "I got a call saying 'could the stills photographer come down and photograph various objects in the house,' and when she arrived the instruction was every lampshade, every pillow, every cushion, every chair - everything. And, of course, it all appears in the interiors (of Fantastic Mr Fox).
"God knows how the studio made them, because it was all done in three sizes. There's a wonderful yellow ancient mug that all his (Dahl's) pencils were in, in the writing hut here, and that was reduced to about three centimetres.
"And the chair that he wrote in, he re-did that, and the board that Mr Fox has on his lap in the office, that was all taken from how Roald wrote his books in the hut."
In fact, says Felicity Dahl, Wes Anderson fell so in love with the chair that Roald Dahl used at the dining table that she believes he has had it copied for his own house.
The painstaking process of stop-frame animations meant that the film took around two years to make. This technique involves the frame-by-frame manipulation of a three-dimensional object - a puppet, a model or even an actor - to bring it to life and make it appear to move.
However, as Felicity Dahl rightly says, the results are perfect. "I think Wes's eye is incredible - and his taste. He has a phenomenal elegance about him."
It's an elegance that he bestows on his animal models, as Felicity Dahl explains, "Even Mr Fox's corduroy suit, which is copied on Wes's suit. It took a long time to get it absolutely right, because...reducing corduroy for a little model to wear is not easy. The costume makers are incredible."
However, Felicity Dahl says that the visual style of Fantastic Mr Fox has nothing to do with Quentin Blake's illustrations for the English editions. Instead, the visual reference point was the director's own American childhood.
"He fell in love with Donald Chaffyn's illustrations, who illustrated the first editions of Fantastic Mr Fox for America. They are absolutely enchanting, and he (Wes) wanted to get that look," she explains. "The Chaffyn ones are more like Beatrix Potter; they're little people. He's old fashioned, Wes, and he wanted to make these animals real – and clothed - in great elegance."
Although the film could have run the risk of becoming a nostalgia trip for grown-ups refusing to grow up, when she attended the early screenings with her grandchildren Felicity Dahl realised this was not going to be the case. And when the studio people asked her 11-year-old grandson if he thought other children would enjoy it, the young chap retorted, "Well if they don't, they'll be terribly boring."
Couldn't have put it better myself. With its incredible detail, fabulous sense of fun and stellar cast, Fantastic Mr Fox is an enchanting film that both adults and children will want to watch again and again. It is, as Felicity Dahl herself says, "a masterpiece," which she believes is very close to the original spirit of the book.
"That's where I think he's been so clever, I really do. I think he's got a complete Dahl-esque spirit to the film. I actually think it is the one film that Roald would have enjoyed. He hated the other adaptations of Charlie and The Witches, but this one, I think, would have won his heart."