I’ve said this a million times before, but if there’s one type of film I wish we could see more of at the local theater, it’s documentary shorts. Narrative features are crappy 80 percent of the time, while documentary shorts waste half your time and are almost never bad. This one, called “The Meaning of Robots,” premieres this Friday at Sundance, and – and I swear to God this isn’t unearned hyperbole – it looks amazing. AMAZING, I TELL YOU! (*puts cigar out in scotch, rushes off to stop the presses*)

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(Johnny Depp with Gomez and Morticia)

UPDATE 3-19: MTV spoke with Burton’s people, who said, “There is no truth to the story. Tim has not lined up any of his upcoming projects.”  So they deny it’s a done deal, but the second sentence seems to say it’s still a possibility.

In a move that I’d wonder why happened yet if it hadn’t already happened twice in the 90s, Hollywood is making an Addams Family movie.  Tim Burton will direct, because he’s already basically made like four Addams Family movies.

[From Deadline] Tim Burton will direct a 3D, stop-motion animated film based on Charles Addams’ original ghoulish cartoon drawings of The Addams Family. Illumination Entertainment, Universal’s family film unit, has acquired the underlying rights of the Addams drawings, once a staple of The New Yorker magazine.

Other than being inspired by the same source material, the animated feature is unrelated to previous incarnations of Addams’ work, the 60s TV series, the two `90s feature film comedies that Barry Sonnenfeld directed with Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston, or the Broadway musical opening this spring with Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth in the starring roles.

See?  Based on the New Yorker cartoon; totally unrelated to all those film-remakes of old TV shows and definitely not a blatant attempt to cash in.  I confess that I didn’t even know that the original Addams Family was based on a New Yorker cartoon, but that’s probably because none of the characters was a dog sitting on a psychiatrist’s couch.

To follow up on the other day’s story about Wes Anderson ‘directing’ production at The Fantastic Mr. Fox‘s London studio via email from Paris (and FMF is stop-motion, so there actually is a physical set involved), I was able to get the original Empire Magazine story. Here’s a little more from it:

…For reasons best known to himself, Anderson is directing the film via email from Paris [...] which has disquieted some of the crew.  “I didn’t meet him before I got the job,” admits cinematographer Tristan Oliver, renowned for his work with Nick Park on Chicken Run and the Wallace & Gromit movies.  “That was all done at a remove; he obviously saw my showreel and CV and stuff, but we didn’t meet.  And when we finally did meet, it was after he sent me a number of DVDs.  He has a lot of favourite films that he likes to reference.  He’s in love at various points with various genres, I think, and when we started, he was playing around with a kind of Bergman/Fellini feel.  Really just specific scenes in specific films.  And so the process of interpreting what he wanted started at that point, because you think, ‘I’ve got 15 DVDs here — what does he want?’”

Hold on, you mean to tell me a hipster icon is into Bergman and Fellini?  Excuse me while I stop my bow tie from spinning comically.  In any case, the movie looks good from what I’ve seen so far.  See, sometimes being a director is like being psychologist.  You just hire talented people to do your work for you and whenever they ask what you want, you just say, “What do YOU think I want?”  and take a puff from a big pipe.  I’d like to see Wes Anderson direct Terrence Howard.  Wes Anderson would explain a scene by sending him a Koyaanisqatsi DVD, and Terrence Howard would express his response to it via interpretive dance, and the crew would snap their fingers in appreciation.

[Thanks to giantcowofdoom for the scans]

Take this with a grain of salt as it comes from the print version of last month’s Empire magazine, which I’m still waiting to get a scan of, but the magazine has an interview with Tristan Oliver, the cinematographer on the (awesome-looking) Fantastic Mr. Fox.  Oliver seems to imply that Wes Anderson directed the film via email.  Which sounds a lot like, you know, not directing.  From this guy:

According to an inadvertently extraordinary interview with the animators in this month’s Empire, [Wes Anderson] is keeping his distance from the set and directing via e-mail*, sending in his favourite DVDs to give an impression of what he’d like to see. Cinematographer Tristan Oliver, asked about his working relationship with Anderson, replies: [Quoting Empire]  “I think Wes doesn’t understand what you can do, and he often wants us to do what you can’t do, and the length of time the process takes … I don’t think he quite comprehends that, and how difficult it is to change something once you’ve started. It takes a big amount of someone’s time to change a very small thing. I think he also doesn’t understand that an animator is a performer. An animator is an actor. And this is the secret to animation: you direct your animator, you do not direct the puppet, because the puppet is an inanimate object. You direct an animator as if you’re directing an actor, and they will give you a performance. So we’ll get a note back from Wes saying ‘that arm movement is wrong.’ But that arm movement is part of a fluid performance. And that has been really quite difficult for the animators.”

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This is a short film by Takeuchi Taijin called “Stop Motion with Wolf and Pig.”  Before you go getting excited,  the “wolf” is just Takeuchi in a paper maché wolf hat and tail, and the pig is a paper maché pig.  Despite that, it’s pretty cool.  He takes pictures of pictures, then edits them together to make a sort of 3-D space inside his apartment… yeah, it’s totally meta, bro, just watch it. Though I confess it would’ve been better with an octopus and a schoolgirl, or a robot that eats panties.

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