Continuing my assessment of the career of writer/director Wes Anderson, I’ve arrived at 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. This was Anderson’s first adaptation and his first animated film.
Coming on the heels of The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, both of which received lukewarm critical receptions, Fantastic Mr. Fox was greeted as a comeback and return to form for the auteur. It boasts a Rotten Tomatoes score in the mid-90s and grossed $47 million.
The first Beach Boys song I considered for this list of favorite “happy” songs was ‘God Only Knows.’ It’s probably my favorite of theirs. But I quickly realized that it’s pretty melancholy as love songs go.
So I went with my backup, another favorite of mine, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice?’ You could argue that this song is bittersweet as well — after all, it’s about a couple that can’t be together the way they want to be — but it’s musically exuberant.
Here’s a nice marriage of art and science. Alexander Chen, of the Google Creative Lab, programmed this visualization of an isolated Beach Boys vocal track based on the aural dynamics of church bells.
In his words, “Using a mathematical relationship between the circumference of a circular surface and pitch, I wrote code that draws a circle for each note of the song.”
Meet Me In Montauk 