Alexandre Desplat Scoring Wes Anderson’s ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’?

Is ‘Benjamin Button’ composer Alexandre Desplat writing the music to Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox”? According to the film’s IMDB page, yes, and the info must be relatively new because we periodically check to see if there are any updates (for a while the music credits were blank). However, there’s no mention of ‘Fox’ listed on Desplat’s official website yet.

Our understanding of the IMDB process is that adds like these have to be requested by the author or someone working for them, but IMDB is still very fallible and does have incorrect info up there from time to time. There’s probably no reason not to believe it though.

Some might ask, no Mark Mothersbaugh, the longtime Anderson-composer who worked on every film save for “The Darjeeling Limited”? (it used pre-existing score music from the great Indian director/composer Satyajit Ray). There’s no ‘Fox’ mention on Mothersbaugh’s site either. In an undated UGO interview that sounds like it was a few years after ‘Life Aquatic,’ Mothersbaugh told the website, ” Wes actually put out the idea of scoring the film first like an old Looney Tunes cartoon. I think the way that would work is that you would do it like a radio show, where you record all the voices, then I would score that.”

But it appears that’s not happening.

We do know that ex-Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker is writing some songs for the film and apparently some of it has a “hillbilly” banjo-centric motif. “There’s only one [song] I’ve finished up to now,” Cocker said in August. It’s a slightly hillbilly-sounding song actually, but yeah, [Wes Anderson]’s doing this thing for ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’, it’s like a model animation, you know, so kind of old-fashioned.”

The ‘Fox’ director, Cocker, some friends and what looks like longtime-Anderson music supervisor Randall Poster on the right, were spotted in March of last year hanging out in Paris, Wes with a ukulele in hand.

Desplat is also scoring Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life,” which will hopefully come out sometime in 2009 (rumored to be at Cannes too, but since there’s been zero talk of it lately, it seems dubious).

Score news of less interest because he hasn’t done anything of note in years (though he’s still been Academy nominated up the wazoo, shrug), John Williams is writing the music for Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn.”
“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is scheduled to hit theaters on November 6. It would be nice if some photos of the stop-motion animation would be released already.