Noah Baumbach Update - Fantastic Mr. Fox

I'm a huge fan of the film Kicking and Screaming. No, not the film with Will Ferrell about a kids soccer team. The first K&S was written and directed by first-time filmmaker Noah Baumbach, and followed a group of recent college grads immobilized by a "quarterlife crisis" long before anyone had coined that term. I found the characters' self-doubting and malaise eerily familiar, making this one of the seminal films of my early adulthood. Baumbach followed it up with Mr. Jealousy, and underrated romantic comedy that failed to capitalize on his earlier critical success. The bizarre, ultra-low-budget Highball came next, and was, I believe, released straight to video. Sometime during all of that activity, he produced a television pilot about 20somethings starring Eric Stoltz that failed to attract a buyer.

The last few years have hosted a, for me, long overdue Baumbach resurgence. He cowrote with director Wes Anderson the brilliant Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Anderson then produced Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, which earned great accolades at Sundance. I can't wait to see that film, a 80s-era memoir of how he and his brother dealt with their parents' divorce (again, likely to prove creepily similar to my own experiences), and noticed, with excitement, the recent online dissemination of the trailer.

Already basking in the anticipation, I came across this tidbit while exploring his bio on the film's website:

"He also co-wrote THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (2004) and the upcoming FANTASTIC MR. FOX from a novel by Roald Dahl with Wes Anderson."

Fantastic Mr. Fox! Further research indicates this will be a stop-motion animated film. The last attempt at adapting Dahl to stop motion, James and the Giant Peach, yielded very mixed results. But with Anderson directing, and Revolution Studios producing (instead of Disney/Touchstone), the film has a chance of being true to my own nostalgic memories of the novel.