'Greenberg:' A One-Note Sonata That Doesn't Connect

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Fido Takes A Bite Out Of American Pocketbooks

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

When Michael Schaffer and his wife rescued Murphy, a sweet, cuddly and
goofy St. Bernard from a shelter, it led him into a world of
contemporary pet ownership, a world of doggie antidepressants, dog park
politics, dog furniture, organic pet food, and a whole service industry
of grooming, training and caretaking.

In Shaffer's book "One Nation Under Dog," he says America's house pets
have worked their way into a new place in the hearts, homes and wallets
of their owners. "One Nation Under Dog" just came out in paperback.
Schaffer is a journalist who has been a staff writer at the Philadelphia
Inquirer and U.S. News & World Report. I spoke with him when the book
was published in hardcover.

Michael Schaffer, welcome to FRESH AIR. Now, I don't want people to
think that your book mocks people who love their animals and mocks
people who spend money on their animals, but you do take a look at that
phenomenon. So what are you trying to get at in the book?

Mr. MICHAEL SCHAFFER (Author): I guess I wanted to sit down and write a
book about how it is that we became this pampered-pet nation. You kind
of can't go a week or two reading a newspaper without seeing some crazy
story about what people do for their animals. You know, it's the dog
with the pink mohair sweater, or look at these people, they feed organic
cat food. And these stories tend to have a kind of undercurrent of
derision in them. You know, this is a sign of frivolity and over-the-top
excess. Particularly in these dark economic times, this is out of place.

And I felt that way when I got a dog. My wife and I remember - we were
driving to this shelter where we knew this dog we wanted was available.
And we were driving - it was about two and a half hours from our house,
and the whole way up, we were talking about how, well, we're not going
to become like those people, the ones that we had heard about.

And we were saying, you know, we're not going to do this and we're not
going to do this, and we're not going to do this. And of course then the
dog arrives, and all of that goes out the window. And it doesn't go out
the window because he's so cute and melts your heart, although that
helps. It goes out the window because a lot of the stuff is actually - a
lot of the stuff people do for their pets now is just an inevitable
reaction or reflection of the society we live in.

GROSS: Let me ask you to give an example, and here's the one I'm
thinking of: A lot of people make fun of animals who are taking things
like antidepressants.

Mr. SCHAFFER: Right.

GROSS: Your dog on antidepressants - because of what?

Mr. SCHAFFER: Well, we had jobs, and we had this dog at home. And we
live in a little row house in Philadelphia. And our next-door neighbors
are retired and they're home all day. And one night they came to us and
said, you know, that dog of yours yaps from the minute you guys leave in
the morning until the minute you guys come home.

And this was a time when he would also go to the bathroom in the house
when we left. We would take turns rushing home at lunch, you know,
hoping to head it off, which didn't usually work. And you know, he was
quite clearly in distress.

And you know, I mentioned this to the vet, kind of in passing, more
thinking, hey, do you have any, you know, behavior-type techniques I
could do to help him relax. And the vet said, you know, there's a drug
for that. It's called separation anxiety, that's the condition he's got,
and there is a canine version of a human tricyclic antidepressant. The
only actual chemical difference is that the pills are beef-flavored.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. SCHAFFER: And you know, this was this thing where our - my in-laws,
my uncles were saying, you know, you're giving your dog antidepressants?
I mean, what's the matter with this country where even our dogs are on
antidepressants. Aren't they supposed to be the happiest creatures in
the world?

And you know, I guess if you step back and look at it that way, it seems
kind of silly. But as a very practical matter, we should all be so lucky
as to have had the positive effect he had from the medication. And you
know, we're at a time when we humans are quite comfortable with psycho-
pharmaceuticals. There was a - maybe I shouldn't say this - but there
was a time when, you know, all three members of our household were using
some sort of antidepressant.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. SCHAFFER: Now he's the only one. But you know, this is all just to
say that we humans are quite comfortable with this. Lots of people do
it. It's not weird. It doesn't mean you're crazy, and as you - you see
this with a lot of things in the pet-spending world, where things that
we experience and kind of think of as normal, we will go and ask, hey,
can I do that for my dog or my cat?

GROSS: But as you point out in your book, putting your dog on
antidepressants because of separation anxiety, his separation anxiety,
is a reflection on how humans live now.

Mr. SCHAFFER: Absolutely.

GROSS: I mean, there used to be a time when a family that had a dog
typically had a mother-homemaker who was there all day, who was there
with the dog, or there were kids of different ages, and there was a
young kid at home to play with the dog. There was a yard that the dog
could run around in. And now you've got dogs cooped up at home with
nobody home to play with them, nothing to occupy them. And so it puts
the dog in a position of great discomfort because they have no activity
and no company.

Mr. SCHAFFER: That's absolutely right. And I mean, you know, I write in
my book that an anthropologist from Mars or something that showed up
here and had only the contents of like, a PetSmart to look at, could
figure out a great deal about our human society.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: What would they learn?

Mr. SCHAFFER: Well, they would learn, among other - I mean, looking at
just this question, they would learn that we are a society where two-
career couples are the norm in a lot of places, and that has led to a
whole bunch of things.

It's led to more dogs being alone more of the time. It's led to these
very elaborate chew toys that I write about where, you know, these toys
are basically designed to keep the pet entertained during these very
long absences of its people. And they have these, all of these devices
to kind of make it complicated to get a piece of food out from the
middle.

And the idea is that a dog, you know, with this toy thrown to him in the
morning, as the owner heads off for the day, will actually spend a
couple of hours trying to manipulate it and chew on it in a certain way
that makes the food pop out and so on.

And at the end of that, the dog will be exhausted. He'll be mentally
stimulated, which is great on a theoretical level. He also won't spend
the rest of the day destroying your couch, which has a more practical
benefit for humans.

So people still want pets. They want them, I think, more than they ever
did, and they are adjusting the nature of pet-keeping in such ways as to
reflect the other aspects of how we live.

GROSS: And that's part of the reason why a whole pet services industry,
a huge pet services industry, has grown up.

Mr. SCHAFFER: Right, right.

GROSS: Give us an overview of some of the services available for pets
now.

Mr. SCHAFFER: You can find some really crazy examples of wealth and
excess in pet services, and you can also find some very practical
things.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. SCHAFFER: I spent a day driving around Manhattan with this pet taxi
driver. And his company would take calls from people, saying, you know,
I need to take my dog to the vet. Manhattan's a place where a lot of
people don't have cars. And you can't just take any old pet on the
subway, and a lot of cabs won't stop for you. So it's actually a
practical need that was being filled.

And there's another - there's also this incredibly fast-growing business
of professional dog grooming. And you know, to me it is connected fairly
intimately with this change in where people's pets have lived, literally
lived, over the years.

In the old days it was pretty common to have your dog, especially, sleep
out back for the night, in the doghouse or out in the yard. I actually
saw an article in a business journal that sort of traced images of dogs
in advertisements in women's magazines over the course of the 20th
century.

And in the 1920s the sort of prototypical picture would be of a stylish
woman out on the street, walking her dog in public. By the '50s you'd
have the dog kind of curled up on the hearth in the living room. And by
the '80s and '90s, you had this image of, you know, like an aspirin ad,
where the mom is supplying medicine to the sick child, and the dog is
literally on the child's bed.

So it's this kind of progression indoors and into the family and into
the bedroom. I don't think it's any surprise, given that - I think I saw
statistically it said 47 percent of people have their pets sleep in
their own bed. I don't think it's any surprise, given that...

GROSS: Sleep in the people's bed.

Mr. SCHAFFER: Sleep in the people's bed. I don't think it's any
surprise, given that those people are going to be a lot more interested
in getting their dog groomed because you don't want to sleep with a
stinky dog.

GROSS: I know that there are dog parks in most cities. Do you have a dog
park to take Murphy to?

Mr. SCHAFFER: Not officially.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. SCHAFFER: There is - in my neighborhood there's - you know, but it's
interesting you ask that because when we got Murphy and began taking him
to this park in the neighborhood where everybody takes their dogs, you
know, it was like I was Margaret Mead and had landed in Samoa.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. SCHAFFER: There was this very intricate network of rules and what
you're supposed to do and what you're not supposed to do. And no one
wrote them down and no one told you them, but you just sort of figured
them out. And you could see how the people who were regulars of the park
would, you know, shun people who engaged in behavior that wasn't cool or
subtly remind you of what you're supposed to do.

You know, heaven forbid that you let your dog poop and don't pick it up
because everyone will remind you. But there's other types of things,
which, as I went around, I visited a lot of dog parks, there's great
variation among dog parks, and even these informal ones, in terms of
what is permitted and what isn't. And I'm not, again, talking about a
written list of rules.

GROSS: Give me an example.

Mr. SCHAFFER: Well, in my neighborhood, I live in a sort of college-y
neighborhood right by a university. And one thing dogs do in dog parks
is they hump. And you know, most of the time people have a kind of dogs-
will-be-dogs attitude - well, you know, that's what they do, they're
dogs. And you know, sometimes if there's a new person, people will try
to get their dog to not do that because they don't how the new person
will react. But that tends to be how it works.

There's another very nice, actually legal, official dog park in a kind
of ritzy part of town that we take our dog to sometimes, and there it's
really not okay.

GROSS: So are you a regular now at the dog park? You know all the rules?

Mr. SCHAFFER: I'm a regular there not because I know all the rules but
because it's the closest thing to my house.

GROSS: Right, right.

Mr. SCHAFFER: And it's actually been a place where, you know, I spend an
hour a day there. And I've made a lot of friends. And some - one of our,
my wife and I, one of our closest friends in our city is someone we met
through the park. And I think this is quite typical, this idea of...

GROSS: That's a point you make in your book, that dogs are a way of
connecting to other people, in addition to having a connection to the
dogs. And in a society where we're growing increasingly isolated...

Mr. SCHAFFER: Right. And this is - I mean this is something that's been
the subject of a certain amount of scholarly research. But it's
something I've also sort of experienced in my own life at my
neighborhood dog park. And I've also sort of seen it in action and - and
I've written about some of the business people who are trying to take
advantage of it. In Austin, Texas, I remember visiting a bar that had a
Yappy Hour, I believe, every Wednesday or Thursday night...

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. SCHAFFER: ...and it was a great idea. I mean, whoever thought of
this...

GROSS: That you bring your pet with you?

Mr. SCHAFFER: Bring your pet with you. And you know, it was outdoors and
they had put out some dog bowls and - probably a quiet night of the
week, and it was a great way of drumming up business. The people who
were there loved it because for them, you know, having to rush home from
work every day and walk the dog, while a pleasure also, you know, sort
of impeded on their social life a little bit, and this was a way to
combine the two, and as ornate as a lot of city dog parks may be now,
very few of them serve beer.

GROSS: You know, you mentioned earlier that more people seem to have
pets now than ever before. And if that's true, have you thought about
the reasons why that might be true?

Mr. SCHAFFER: The most convincing of the reasons I've heard, and I can't
claim to have come up with it myself, you know, traces the point where
the growth of the pet population began to grow faster than the human
population, to the 1960s, late '60s.

And the argument is that this is the same time when we began moving
further from families, and more divorce, and people leaving tight-knit
urban neighborhoods in favor of a more isolated suburban lifestyle, and
a kind of broad array of social support mechanisms going away, and that
one thing people did was turn to pets to help fill that void.

And I think it also explains the role that pets were given in this new
world, that they were considered much more as full-fledged members of
the family, with all of our obligations to them, than in the old days.
And if you walk through a pet cemetery, you know, you can kind of see
this in real time, some of the very old graves are likely to say, or
liable to say, you know, here lies Fido, a loyal servant.

And newer ones, you'll find, you know, here lies Fido, my best friend.
Or often - and there are all these Internet sites where people can write
tributes to their recently deceased pets, and it'll say, my baby, or
Fido was my child - except that his name is not so likely to be Fido
anymore.

I actually saw some statistics from a pet insurance company about what
the most common names of policyholders was, and it was like Max and Jake
and Chloe and Julie, which are also pretty common names for babies
nowadays.

GROSS: My guest is Michael Schaffer, author of "One Nation Under Dog."
We'll continue the interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist Michael
Schaffer, and he's the author of the new book "One Nation Under Dog:
Adventures in the New World of Prozac-Popping Puppies, Dog-Park Politics
and Organic Pet Food."

You have a chapter on, basically, dog-training culture wars. You compare
two different styles...

Mr. SCHAFFER: Right.

GROSS: ...of dog training. And what are the different styles, and what
do they tell you about our culture today?

Mr. SCHAFFER: Right. Well, there is - the number of - according to the
federal government, the number of animal trainers in the country tripled
in just six years between 2000 and 2006. And you know, one of the
reasons for this is, as I said, that getting dog training has become,
for a lot of middle-class pet owners, a kind of basic, normal,
responsible thing you do to be a good citizen.

And there has been this wildly popular and really good TV show called
"The Dog Whisperer," starring Cesar Millan, which is like a weekly
advertisement for the concept of dog training. You see him go - you
know, you might imagine hiring a dog trainer is something that only, you
know, absurdly rich people do, or you only do if you want to train a
seeing eye dog or a stunt dog or something, and that's how it used to
be, or at least you'd only do if you had kind of a problem dog.

And, you know, watching "The Dog Whisperer," you actually see him go
into these houses of perfectly normal people - and granted, normal
people whose dogs are acting in ways they don't want but people who are
not fancy, spendthrift types.

The thing is, though, that this growth of this industry has masked or
hasn't made up for the fact that there are wildly divergent views about
what the most effective and most humane way to train a dog is.

For most of the 20th century, since the sort of dawn of kind of modern
dog training, which was geared, again, towards police dogs and Hollywood
dogs and whatever - it was this very rote military-style training.

Actually, the first prominent dog trainer was in the Prussian police
force. So you can imagine it was sort of in his image and it was - if
the dog, you know, doesn't behave in the right way, jerk its chain. And
that idea kind of carried through most of the 20th century.

There was this pedagogical revolution in the '70s and '80s among
trainers who thought, hey, maybe actually positive reinforcement, you
know, hitting him with a reward as quickly as possible after he does
something well, is a more effective way to train.

The argument was that dogs are too dumb to figure out why it is you're
kicking them. So if you were trying to correct some bad behavior, it's
difficult to do that through these purely negative ways.

And this positive reinforcement model kind of became the standard among
professionals and - academically based professionals as well as trainers
who might hang out a shingle and so on - until Cesar's show went on the
air, and his idea is quite different. It's that, you know, there is this
natural order of things, as existed in a pack of wild wolves, where the
alpha dog was the boss and the other dogs were subordinate.

And his idea is the way you - the problem for American dogs, the problem
with their behavior is that we have lost touch with the natural order of
things and that the way to shape a dog's behavior is to remind it that
you, the human, are its alpha, which seems good in theory, but to a lot
of the positive trainers, the ways he gets to that are considered cruel,
or at least impractical.

And they see all this sort of talk about nature as just a mask for a
return to this old-fashioned, dominant, top-down model. And to my mind,
it all plays out kind of like a version of the culture wars over how to
raise a kid, you know? We've got one side based in institutions and
universities that has a softer, more positive approach. You have another
side that says our society has gone amiss because we've lost our
discipline and lost our sense of authority. And you know, it sounds
awfully familiar.

GROSS: Which kind of - which approach did you go with your trainer?

Mr. SCHAFFER: We hired a woman who, because we didn't know anything
about this, we, you know, hired a woman at a good Web site, and we liked
her a lot, who had a kind of alpha approach. And it was this, you know,
when you go through a door, you go first, Murphy doesn't go first. That
way he...

GROSS: You've got to teach him who's boss.

Mr. SCHAFFER: Right. And when you come home, don't pet him. Once he has
calmed down, call him over to the couch and then pet him. And she was a
- we really like her. And she, you know, things I'm saying might sort of
- removed from the experience, might sound kind of monstrous, but the
argument was this is what will make him feel better, that, you know, any
behavior problems he has have to do with anxiety over who's the boss,
and that dogs, unlike humans, are not sitting around scheming, hoping to
become the boss, but that what they do need is a secure sense of where
they are in the order of things.

So it was, you know, put out his food for exactly 20 minutes a day, then
put it away. He has to know that he's going to eat on your schedule, not
on his. And you know, he doesn't get to come on the bed, and when you
walk him, you know, hold the leash tight, and he doesn't get to decide
where you go, and that sort of thing. And it, you know, it worked.

GROSS: Michael Schaffer, thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. SCHAFFER: Thank you for having me.

GROSS: Michael Schaffer is the author of "One Nation Under Dog." The
paperback edition will be published next week. Our interview was
recorded last year, when the book came out in hardcover. I'm Terry
Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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For Wes Anderson, A 'Fantastic' Animated Adventure

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

If you haven't seen "Fantastic Mr. Fox," you have a second chance. It
just came out on DVD and Blu-ray. The film was nominated for two Oscars,
Best Animated Film and Best Original Score.

We're going to hear the interview I recorded with Wes Anderson, who
directed and co-wrote the film. Anderson also made the movies
"Rushmore," "The Royal Tennenbaums" and "The Darjeeling Limited."

"Fantastic Mr. Fox" is Anderson's first animated film. It uses miniature
animal puppets and miniature sets animated through stop motion
photography to create a visually amazing world. The story is adapted
from a children's book by Roald Dahl, but the move adds new characters
and storylines.

At the beginning of the story, Mr. Fox moves his wife and son to a new
home near three evil farmers. Mr. Fox has promised Mrs. Fox that he'll
never steal chickens again, because as a father he couldn’t risk being
captured. But he succumbs to his animal instincts and steals some of the
farmer's chickens. After that, the farmers are on the warpath against
Mr. Fox and his family.

Wes Anderson, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Now, I never read Roald Dahl. I
never read "Fantastic Mr. Fox," but I got a copy after seeing your film.
What did the book mean to you, and why did you want to adapt it into a
film?

Mr. WES ANDERSON (Director, "Fantastic Mr. Fox"): Well, it was the first
Roald Dahl book that I ever read as a child, and I became a huge fan of
Dahl, and he was a big part of my childhood. For some reason, this book
was the one I always kept with me.

Wherever I lived, when I went to college, I always had this book on my
shelves. It's not a very - it's a slim book, and it's really kind of - I
think it's for young children, but something about it always stuck with
me. And I think the character of Mr. Fox is a very Dahl kind of figure,
and he's the one who rescues everybody, but he's also the cause of all
of their problems, and his personality gets them into these problems in
the first place. And I think something about that grabbed me.

And at a certain point I started thinking I would like to do a stop-
motion film, and a stop-motion film with puppets with fur. And this
really, you know, it was a good opportunity for that. This connected
with that.

GROSS: You've added a lot of adult themes to this children's story, and
by adult I don't mean sexual. I mean more existential.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. ANDERSON: Yeah.

GROSS: Like, Mr. and Mrs. Fox used to steal chickens, but after getting
trapped and nearly getting killed or losing their freedom in a cage, he
swears he's going to give up stealing chickens, and he becomes a
newspaper columnist instead. But he still has the hunger for chickens
and for the adventure, and he has an existential crisis. You know, who
is he? Is he a fox?

Mr. ANDERSON: Yes. I think he likes the word existentialism more than
anything else.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: I want to play a clip in which he decides to go back to stealing
chickens again, and he enlists his not-very-bright possum friend to be
his accomplice. So this is Mr. Fox with his friend, the possum, Kylie.

(Soundbite of movie, "The Fantastic Mr. Fox")

Mr. GEORGE CLOONEY (Actor): (As Mr. Fox) Who am I, Kylie?

Mr. WALLACE WOLODARSKY (Actor): (As Kylie) Who, how, what now?

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Mr. Fox) Why a fox? Why not a horse or a beetle or a
bald eagle? I'm saying this more as, like, existentialism, you know? Who
am I, and how can a fox ever be happy without a - you'll forgive the
expression - a chicken in its teeth?

Mr. WOLODARSKY: (As Kylie) I don't know what you're talking about, but
it sounds illegal.

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Mr. Fox) Here, put this bandit hat on. Maybe you're a
medium. Take it off for a minute and don't wear it around the house.

GROSS: I really love that.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: So what does it mean to be a fox? I love the idea that these
animals are - that this animal in particular is having an identity
crisis about whether he should be overcoming his fox instincts or not.

Mr. ANDERSON: Yes, he's a bit obsessed with the idea of being a wild
animal.

GROSS: And, you know, the creatures in the film, you know, like, they're
all dressed as humans with, like, you know, suits and ties and dresses,
but - and - you know, they have, like, kitchens and living rooms and
furniture, but underneath it all, I mean, they're animals.

So, like, there's this wonderful scene at the kitchen table where Mr.
Fox is reading a newspaper, and Mrs. Fox brings out the pancakes for the
family. But once they start eating, they just like...

(Soundbite of snorting)

GROSS: ...like, you know, like animals, because that's what they are,
and it's so funny.

Mr. ANDERSON: Yeah.

GROSS: And there's another scene like that I want to play, just to give
our listeners a sense of the story. And this is a scene where Mr. Fox,
played by George Clooney, is talking to his lawyer, a badger played by
Bill Murray. And the lawyer is advising him not to move into a house
right near the really mean farmers, who would probably like to kill a
fox. So here's that scene.

(Soundbite of movie, "Fantastic Mr. Fox")

Mr. BILL MURRAY (Actor): (As Badger) In summation, I think you just got
to not do it, man, that's all.

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Mr. Fox) I understand what you're saying, and your
comments are valuable, but I'm going to ignore your advice.

Mr. MURRAY: (As Badger) The cuss you are.

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Mr. Fox) The cuss am I? Are you cussing with me?

Mr. MURRAY: (As Badger) No, you cussing with me?

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Mr. Fox) Don't cuss and point at me.

Mr. MURRAY: (As Badger) You're going to cuss with someone, you're not
going to cuss with me, you little cuss.

(Soundbite of snarling)

(Soundbite of bell)

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Mr. Fox) Just buy the tree.

Mr. MURRAY: (As Badger) Okay.

GROSS: I love that, the way they actually, like, become animals.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. ANDERSON: Yes, it kicks in.

GROSS: Yeah, and you use the word cuss through the movie instead of the
F-word. How did you decide cuss would be your substitute?

Mr. ANDERSON: Well, I don't even remember. I think it was just to use
the - to try to use the concept of profanity as a replacement for the
profanity itself. It turns out to be very versatile.

GROSS: Yes. You do use it very versatility. So as the director and co-
writer of the film, did you actually create the miniature animals?

Mr. ANDERSON: Yes. You know, a movie like this - the process - I didn't
know what it was going to be like to make this movie when we started
out. I had a - I sort of had this thought that we were going to - that I
was going to make the script and work on the sets and then sort of
prepare the shots and have this plan and then hand it over to a team of
animators, and they were going to hand me back a film a year later or
something. I was going to put in an order for one "Fantastic Mr. Fox,"
according to these specifications, and they would send it back.

That was not what happened. It ends up being the most involving kind of
filmmaking that I've ever had anything to do with, and very fun. But the
thing you quickly realize is that everything that is going to go on
camera has to be manufactured from scratch. Everything has to be
designed, and that means every little prop and every little moment is
going to have a lot of thought go into it. And it's an opportunity, but
it's not going to take care of itself. Nothing's going to just be
discovered, like stumbling across a location.

GROSS: You have to create the bodies of the animals, the clothes they
wear, the houses they live in, the street they live on, the sunrise, the
sunset, you know, the ground beneath their feet. You have to create
absolutely everything.

Mr. ANDERSON: Yes, it actually was quite - you know, it's rare that you
get the chance to say, I have an idea for a cloud that I want to do.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. ANDERSON: And you know, the leaves and trees and everything. And I
think with stop-motion it's the combination of miniature with the idea
that someone is taking these - you sort of sense that someone is taking
these and moving them around and bringing them to life through some sort
of handmade process that's just like a sort of magic. It's like toys.

GROSS: Why don't you describe how stop-motion photography works.

Mr. ANDERSON: Sure, yes. Stop-motion is - it's that technique where you
- I'll describe it, particularly in relation to our movie. It's puppets,
and in our case these puppets have metal skeletons inside them. So if
you move them a little bit, they stay in position.

So the animator moves the puppets one frame at a time, and each time he
moves it, it's - so to complete an action, he poses it many, many times
and takes a picture each time he re-poses it, and then those are played
back quickly, and it appears to move around. And that's really the basic
technique of the whole movie, this old-fashioned style of animation.

GROSS: So do you need to have a little bit of OCD, obsessive-compulsive
disorder, to work in stop-time animation? Because everything has to be
handmade, and then you have to move each puppet, like, a fraction of an
inch for each frame that you're shooting.

Mr. ANDERSON: Yes, well, it's, you know, the people who actually do the
physical process of animating, they have to be experts. They have to be
very experienced, and they have to be supremely talented to do this. And
there aren't that many people that do it. So it's a special personality
type, it's special talents.

And you know, when you prepare a shot for a stop-motion film, when you
prepare the shot, you draw what you want, you know, what you want the
shot to be. You've recorded the voices already, and you work with the
animator to make a plan of what's going to happen in time. The animator
has a sheet that's prepared that shows what happens on each frame. So
when you study this sheet, you'll see on frame 220, a character is
beginning to lift his arm and pronouncing a sh-sound. You know, it's
down to the syllables. You know, there's four frames where he's
pronouncing sh, and then he's moving to the next thing.

It's the most-detailed preparation you could possibly have for a shot,
and yet each animator will surprise you with how he interprets this
incredibly precise plan. And that's sort of the part that you just can't
understand. Something happens - they work in this very, very gradual
process, but they're doing something that it just - that really is like
magic. And it isn't just moving the puppet around, it's making it seem
like it's alive.

GROSS: Right, and now I want you to just, like, describe in detail one
of the puppets, maybe Mr. Fox.

Mr. ANDERSON: Okay. Mr. Fox, that puppet is, let's say he's maybe 13
inches tall, the main puppet, which - the main puppet - I'll explain
what I mean. There are different scales. So a full-scale, what we call a
full-scale Mr. Fox puppet is about 13 inches tall. It has this steel or
titanium skeleton that has joints in it and even joints in the fingers
and many bones in the face, and it has fur over it. It has eyes that
move around separately, and you can move them with a little pin, and its
got a costume.

GROSS: Describe the costume.

Mr. ANDERSON: The costume is a sort of rust-colored corduroy suit with a
terrycloth shirt with yellow zigzags on it. And he has - you know, one
of the things - you know, I saw one of our people making something one
day. I was, like, what are you working on? It was - he has little stalks
of wheat in his pocket, like cigars or something. And this - one of our,
one of the people who works in the props department was making wheat.
And to see somebody make tiny, tiny miniature wheat is just - you know,
you know you're dealing with a whole other realm than you've ever
experienced.

GROSS: Wes Anderson. He directed and co-wrote "Fantastic Mr. Fox," which
just came out on DVD and Blu-ray.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is screenwriter and director Wes Anderson. We're talking
about his animated movie "Fantastic Mr. Fox," which just came out on DVD
and Blu-ray. When we left off, we were talking about his use of stop-
motion photography.

Stop-motion photography was developed, I think, for the movie "King
Kong," used again in "Mighty Joe Young" and other adventure films. Were
you a big fan of "King Kong" when you were growing up or when you became
an adult?

Mr. ANDERSON: Yeah, I loved "King Kong." You know, when I grew up, I
think when I became aware of stop-motion was - I can't remember the name
of the guy - Willis, maybe? Something like Willis is the guy who did the
stop-motion on "King Kong," and his protégé was Ray Harryhausen, who's
sort of the most famous stop-motion guy ever. And he did a number - and
the ones that I saw were the ones that are sort of Greek mythology -
"Seventh Voyage of Sinbad," "Jason and the Argonauts," there's another
Sinbad movie also, things like "Clash of the Titans."

Those movies all have a big stop-motion element to them, and I really
loved them as a kid. And also there were these TV - the holiday specials
that the Rankin-Bass Company did, the "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,"
and there was one about - there's one that's sort of the story of how
Santa Claus came to be. Those were ones that I - we were - my brothers
and I were really taken with.

GROSS: Now, there's a sport that's played in "Fantastic Mr. Fox," and I
think this is a sport that you made up that's not in the book.

Mr. ANDERSON: Yeah.

GROSS: And it's called Whackbat. I want to play a short scene in which
the rules of the game are explained. These are like wonderful rules. And
Owen Wilson, who's in a lot of your movies, he plays the coach. And in
the scene what we're going to hear is the coach explaining the rules of
Whackbat to the perfect cousin, Kristofferson, because he is going to
put Kristofferson in as a replacement for Ash. So the coach is played by
Owen Wilson, who's in a lot of your films. Ash is played by Jason
Schwartzman, and the cousin is played by your brother, Eric Anderson.

(Soundbite of movie, "Fantastic Mr. Fox")

Mr. OWEN WILSON (Actor): (As Coach Skip) Basically, there's three
grabbers, three taggers, five twig runners, and the player at Whackbat.
The center tagger lights a pine cone and chucks it over the basket and
the whack-batter tries to hit the cedar stick off the cross rock. Then
the twig runners dash back and forth until the pine cone burns out and
the umpire calls hotbox. Finally, at the end, you count up however many
score-downs it adds up to and divide that by nine.

Mr. ERIC ANDERSON (Actor): (As Kristofferson): Got it.

(Soundbite of whistle)

Mr. WILSON: (As Coach Skip) Go in for Ash. Substitution. Ash, come out.
You need a breather.

Mr. JASON SCHWARTZMAN (Actor): (As Ash) What? Come out? Why? I still
feel good coach. Let me finish this eighth.

Mr. WILSON: (As Coach Skip) No, no, come on, step out. Step out. Let's
go.

Mr. SCHWARTZMAN: (As Ash) Am I getting better, coach?

Mr. WILSON: (As Coach Skip) Well, you're sure as cuss not getting any
worse.

Mr. SCHWARTZMAN: (As Ash) Really? You mean, you think I can end up being
as good as my dad if I keep practicing?

Mr. WILSON: (As Coach Skip) Your dad? Your dad was probably the best
Whackbat player we ever had in this school. No, you don't want to have
to compare yourself to that.

GROSS: That's another scene from "Fantastic Mr. Fox." I love the
description of the rules of Whackbat. And if you're not an athlete and
don't follow sports closely, that's how a lot of sports rules...

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: ...sound to you.

Mr. ANDERSON: Yes.

GROSS: So what about you? Do you follow sports carefully or do they all
sound as ridiculous as Whackbat?

Mr. ANDERSON: Well, you know, I used to follow certain sports so much
more carefully, like the 1975 baseball season. I know every single -
every detail of it. But I know absolutely nothing about it right now.
And I used to follow tennis very closely. But cricket, for instance, is
incomprehensible to me. You know, we made the movie in England and
trying to - and I hadn't really watched a cricket match before.

In fact, I'd seen a couple in India but I've never been able to grasp
the first thing about how that operates. It doesn’t really seem to make
any sense. But this game has especially complicated rules.

GROSS: Your new film, "Fantastic Mr. Fox," is almost like a musical in a
sense that there's so much underscoring through the film and then
there's some records used through the film. And so I want to talk a
little bit about the music. Let's start with why there is so much of it
in the movie.

Mr. ANDERSON: Well, you know, with most animated films it's sort of wall
to wall music, and I didn't really expect to do that. But I guess what
usually happens with me is I sort of put in as much music as the movie
feels like it's willing to accommodate. I like music in movies. In the
case of this one, I had a couple of ideas at the beginning.

One was that I thought the score could have a kind of "Peter and the
Wolf" element, where we would assign certain instruments to different
characters. And it ended up being that, you know, Mr. Fox sort of has
this banjo that goes with him and the farmers have different horns and,
you know, there's a rat that has sort of whistling in a Spanish style, a
kind of flamenco guitar. But the main score is written by Alexandre
Desplat, who sort of took a lot of different influences and ideas that
we had and pulled them all together and invented his own version of all
that.

GROSS: The very first song that we hear, though, is this...

(Soundbite of song, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett")

THE WELLINGTONS (Band): (Singing) Born on a mountain top in Tennessee,
greenest state in the land of the free. Raised in the woods, so's he
knew every tree, killed him a bear when he was only three. Davy, Davy
Crockett, king of the wild frontier.

GROSS: So what is "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" from the Walt Disney TV
show doing in your movie?

Mr. ANDERSON: Well, I, somewhere along the way I started thinking, you
know, often I don't really know exactly why I suddenly say - have an
idea like this, but - and in this case I almost feel like his hat may
have a relationship to our main character. But I think...

GROSS: Because of the tail - because of the tail and the coonskin hat?

Mr. ANDERSON: Yeah, just because, you know, he looked like he'd be
wearing Mr. Fox on his head.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. ANDERSON: But at a certain point I started sort of thinking that I
would like to use music from children's films and children's
entertainment, anyway. And we ended up with - we have Davy Crockett,
that's at the beginning of the movie, and we have three different songs
that are by Burl Ives, who was actually in some of the - when I referred
to the Rankin-Bass holiday specials, he's involved in at least one of
them. And we have music from the Disney "Robin Hood." And so it sort of
became the part of the whole - you know, there's - we have lots of - we
also have the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones.

GROSS: Wes Anderson, thank you so much for talking with us and
congratulations on the film.

Mr. ANDERSON: Thank you, Terry. Thank you for having me.

GROSS: Wes Anderson, he directed and co-wrote "Fantastic Mr. Fox," which
just came out on DVD and Blu-ray.

This is FRESH AIR.
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'Greenberg:' A One-Note Sonata That Doesn't Connect

TERRY GROSS, host:

Noah Baumbach is best known for his autobiographical 2005 drama "The
Squid and the Whale," the story of two brothers devastated by their
parents' divorce. His new film, "Greenberg," also features two brothers.
The film focuses on Roger Greenberg, played by Ben Stiller, a depressed
40-year-old who is still unsure what to do with his life. He's house-
sitting in LA for his more successful sibling.

Film critic David Edelstein has this review.

DAVID EDELSTEIN: Noah Baumbach has gotten rave reviews for making the
title character of "Greenberg," played by Ben Stiller, largely
unsympathetic. It's true - it takes guts for Baumbach and Stiller to
flout the Hollywood laws of likability so baldly, to make Roger
Greenberg, a 40-ish unemployed New York carpenter in L.A. to housesit
for his wealthy brother, not a charming jerk but a mopey, jerky jerk.
But I wonder if there's a limit to how self-centered, how small you can
make a character before you're punishing the audience.

It's a line that has gotten more vague now that audiences are turned on
by the aesthetic of squirm. You watch Larry David in "Curb Your
Enthusiasm" as he turns simple encounters into protracted psychodramas
and think - is this funny or painful? Ideally it's both — and when the
approach works, as in Albert Brooks' "Lost in America," you laugh at how
these people can be so unaware of how ridiculous they look. It's their
lack of embarrassment that makes them embarrassing.

But "Greenberg" is meant to be dark and uncomfortably real, part of the
indie genre dubbed mumblecore, in which characters grope through life
without knowing what they want or even how they feel. The question is
not what's eating Greenberg, but what isn't? He's prickly, he's
paranoid. He's an injustice collector. He writes long letters to
companies to avenge small slights. He's been hospitalized for
depression, and it's possible to sympathize with his annoyance when a
noisy family with permission to use his brother's pool invades his
blessed silence.

But then comes the scene with his brother's personal assistant,
Florence, played by Greta Gerwig, a bright young woman barely holding
her life together. Greenberg gets drunk, as he often does, and paws her
with no preamble, no banter, no smile — just a caveman sense of
entitlement. And she doesn't slug him. She has so little self-worth, she
thinks Roger is relationship material.

Baumbach, in his way, thinks so too. On one hand, he seizes every
opportunity to score points off the character, building scenes to expose
Roger's pretentiousness — so there's nothing to do but sit and wait for
him to appall you again. On the other hand, Baumbach paces the movie as
if this stunted child-man is some kind of fascinating case study, and
you're invited to consider how he might be saved. "Greenberg" has the
vague outline of a romance in which a prig learns to loosen up and care
for someone else, but even Roger's breakthroughs reek of childish
egotism.

On their own terms, parts of "Greenberg" are perversely entertaining.
Rhys Ifans plays the ex-bandmate Roger once let down by walking away
from a recording contract. Their scenes are droopy and awkward, amusing
for the ways in which Roger doesn't register his friend's everlasting
hurt.

(Soundbite of movie, "Greenberg")

Mr. BEN STILLER (Actor): (As Roger) People don't call on my birthday
anymore. I guess I don’t call people on their birthdays. Why should they
call me? I didn’t call you. When's yours?

Mr. RHYS IFANS (Actor): (As Ivan) November.

Mr. STILLER: (As Roger) That's right. I'll call you this year.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Unidentified Woman (Actor): (As character) Way over this. Where
(unintelligible) this guy?

Mr. STILLER: (As Roger) Laughing already demonstrates appreciation. The
applause seems superfluous. And also it's like, just treat the
restaurant like it's your living room, guy.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. STILLER: (As Roger) I'm weirdly on tonight.

Mr. IFANS: (As Ivan) (Unintelligible)

Mr. STILLER: (As Roger) Maybe I should've invited Florence, or I
should've had a party.

Mr. IFANS: (As Ivan) Better days ahead, man.

Mr. STILLER: (As Roger) It's weird, aging, right?

Mr. IFANS: (As Ivan) Youth is wasted on the young.

Mr. STILLER: (As Roger) I'd go further. I'd go life is wasted on people.

EDELSTEIN: And in Greta Gerwig, Baumbach has an attractively flighty
heroine. Early on, when Florence is running errands for Roger's
brother's family, Gerwig fairly sings her lines, the melody keeping her
buoyed up through the indignities of servitude. Later, when she endures
Roger's passive-aggressive abuse, she clings to her spaciness as if to
keep his craziness at bay. "Greenberg" might be a heck of a movie if we
could just get Greenberg out of there.

Baumbach and cinematographer Harris Savides create layers and levels of
space to suggest a world with so much stuff — furniture, swimming pools,
drugs — that people can go through life without connecting. But Roger
doesn't connect with us. Even damaged, unpleasant characters need
dramatic stature — something that transcends individual foolishness and
strikes a larger chord. "Greenberg" is a one-note sonata.

GROSS: David Edelstein is film critic for New York magazine. You can
download podcasts of our show on our Web site, freshair.npr.org. And you
can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at nprfreshair.
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Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.