Wes Anderson claims animated movies are “overwhelming”

(Credits: Far Out / Focus Features / Niko Tavernise)

Mon 13 January 2025 10:40, UK

Director Wes Anderson has acknowledged that making animated movies is incredibly challenging compared with making live-action films. 

The director has only created two full-length animated features throughout the course of his three-decade career, 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and 2018’s Isle of Dogs. That being said, most of his live-action films feature an element of animation, including the colourful fish in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and entire scenes in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Due to his frequent use of stop-motion animation, the director was invited to speak at a masterclass last year at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France.

During a 90-minute masterclass published by Variety, Anderson explained that he hadn’t started his career wanting to do animation but had more or less fallen into it after doing live-action. With films like Life Aquatic, his visual style demanded more melding of cinematic methods, including live-action, animation, and animatronics. Although Anderson clearly enjoys the process of making animated movies, he’s never been enticed into making more than one of them in a row. 

“The thing that happens is… by the time you finish a phase of what you’re doing, you’re very happy to move on,” he said, adding, “I love the experience of doing a stop-motion movie. Each time, by the time I’ve finished it, I want to go off and do a live-action movie.”

The director credits animator Mark Gustafson, who was behind the animation of Fantastic Mr. Fox and won an Oscar more recently for his work on Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, with teaching him how to work within the medium. “It took me quite a lot of time to learn how an animated movie is done,” Anderson said, “And I learned it from my collaborators, who were some of the best people in the world at making this kind of movie.”

By the time he made Isle of Dogs nearly a decade after Fantastic Mr. Fox, the director had bolstered his team not only with Gustafson but with puppetmaker Andy Gent, who has gone on to work with him in live-action movies as well.

Despite having streamlined the process for making an animated film with Isle of Dogs, Anderson said that making another is still daunting. “It’s a sort of giant, slightly overwhelming thing,” he said. “But it’s very fun.”

Related Topics

Subscribe To The Far Out Newsletter

_{Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.}