Acclaimed director, Wes Anderson has confirmed that his next film will be a stop-motion animation.
Anderson loves to place his characters within meticulously-constructed, timeless, self-contained environments with their own insular codes and traditions, which are largely expressed through aesthetics: the impeccably-uniformed, tight-knit workspaces of The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Life Aquatic; the make-shift adolescent communities of Moonrise Kingdom and Rushmore; the familial spheres of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited.
His extreme attention to detail, combined with his penchant for expressionistic outsized colour schemes and clearly choreographed body movements lend them a sense of heightened unreality. Given this, it’s unsurprising that the director is drawn to stop-motion animation – a process which literally requires the filmmaker to sculpt dioramas and carefully choreograph even the minutest of background action.
Details of the new project are currently quite vague, but the director has confirmed that following in the footsteps of his 2009 animation, Fantastic Mr Fox, the stop-motion will be animal-centric. Pre-production has already started on the feature, which also means that it has taken precedence over the other Anderson project rumoured to be in gestation – an anthology flick influenced by 60s Italian movies like The Gold of Naples and Boccaccio ’70.
Considering how painstakingly long stop-motion animation takes to shoot, we’re unlikely to see the final product anytime soon, but in the meantime you can get a flavour of what’s to come in the video below.
