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Fantastic Mr Filmmaker: paratexts and the positioning of Wes Anderson as Roald Dahl's cinematic heir

Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) displays a number of traits familiar from its auteur's oeuvre, readily marking it as a ‘Wes Anderson film’ for initiated audiences. However, the film also contains some marked departures: most importantly in how it finds its source in British author Roald Dahl's 1970 children's novel, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and as such marks Anderson's first attempt at adapting another writer's story for the cinema. Anderson is one of the most prominent members of the group Jeffrey Sconce has described as ‘new American “smart” film’, filmmakers celebrated for their idiosyncratic, visually inventive styles who deftly balance the irony of their Generation X group with a reactionary sentimentality. This paper examines paratextual material produced by Anderson and company surrounding this film, both pre- and post-theatrical release, for the ways Anderson as auteur is positioned as a framework mediating encounters with the film, including the emphasizing of Anderson's auteur persona, cinematic signatures, relationship with the original text and his ‘smart film’ sentimentality.