Plusses: Wes Anderson directing. George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray starring. Based on a Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) book.

Minuses: I'm not sold on the stop motion animation. It ain't Nightmare Before Christmas or Coraline quality.

Kind of cool tidbits: Henry Selick (director of the aforementioned Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline), who kept in contact with Anderson, said Anderson would act out scenes while in Paris and send them to the animators via iPhone.

The director chose to record the voices outside of a studio: "We went out in a forest, [..] went in an attic, [and] went in a stable. We went underground for some things. There was a great spontaneity in the recordings because of that.

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810028004/trailer

I'm sure I'll go see it, despite the animation quality.

I'll start with I'm probably Biased because I'm a huge Wes Anderson fan. The controlled color in each set, the costume designs, the voice talent, and the storytelling all seem to be very much Wes Anderson. As does the "independent" look of the stop motion animation. Rather than looking like Nightmare Before Christmas or Coraline(both awesome in their own right) I think the animation styling pays tribute to older stop motion from the late 50's and 60's. Jiri Trnka comes to mind. He's a Czech animator from that time, his animations are somewhat bizarre and very handmade looking.

Minuses: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, George Clooney, George Clooney.

I think the animation looks cool, but Meryl Streep? Seriously? Fuck that.

You guys are smoking, Meryl Streep was hot in the Deer Hunter! That gives her an automatic free pass.

Wes Anderson is always on point, with the attention to detail in his other movies I'm sure this will look great and be very entertaining. Like animator said his style is all over this and that's a good thing in my books, I would be fairly disappointed if he made a stop motion movie that looked like the Nightmare before Christmas.

It totally reminds me of Wind and The Willows which is also kind of cool.

ha! i just read this book with my second grade class last school year!
they loved it, especially the part where mr. fox gets his tail shot off

Awesome comparison, I'd totally forgotten about The Wind and The Willows.

doesn't look that bad - the animation isn't as fluid as I'd expect but that's difficult to say whether or not that was intentional, the video itself or (more than likely) the studio didn't have the money to hire people to do fluid animation.

Between that and the killer new TRON flick I just might...might go and see a movie.

might

It looks fun...I'll check it out!

Yeah I was thinking it was nodding it's head to that era of stop motion.
My intial response was eh, but watching it through, it does work. Sort of a lower grade Wallace & Gromit.

But then I like films with out CGI.

While I'm glad it doesn't look like all the new-style animation, I really don't think I could watch that sort of flickery stop-motion for an hour and a half. Wes Anderson is one of my favorite fimmakers (with the exception of Darjeeling Limited, which I found pretty awful) but this just looks like it's trying a little too hard. And what's wrong with using unknown voice talent if it suits the character, rather than loading it up with big stars just for the sake of it?

whaaa? Meryl Streep is the fucking man. She's one of the best actors anywhere IMHO. Jeffery Wright has impressed me a little more.

I like Bill Murray and Wes's stuff too. I like the old-school animation feel of this movie.

minus: George Clooney. I liked him in O brother where art thou? though. but the cohen brothers write some great lines. I mean, they made Marlon Wayans funny...sort of.

Here's another trailer that looks a lot cleaner...
http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/th ... ox/trailer

I really don't mind the look of the animation at all, Svankmajer's animation is choppy as fuck and that never took anything away from the experience for me...
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 5374875945

I give anything that isn't digitally created a lot of leeway.

Am I the only one that got one of the fox ties? There were several guys out front in tan suits giving them away.