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Though Wes Anderson has only made two fully stop-motion animated feature films — “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Isle of Dogs” — almost all of his films dating as far back as “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” have featured some element of animation. Whether it be a full sequence designed to look like classic French bandes dessinées in “The French Dispatch” or the quirky alien featured in “Asteroid City,” Anderson has come to love animation despite not having any initial interest in it. As such, he was invited to take part in a masterclass held at last year’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France, parts of which were recently published in The Hollywood Reporter.

“It’s a sort of giant, slightly overwhelming thing,” Anderson said of the practice of animation, particularly stop-motion, “but it’s very fun.”

While many have come to love Anderson through his animated work, he still...

Reports that Wes Anderson was aiming for a scaled-back cast for espionage thriller The Phoenician Scheme may well have been off the mark.

When reports first surfaced that Wes Anderson’s next film would be an espionage thriller, minds were left agog pondering what he was actually up to. After all, Anderson used the iconography of 1950s sci-fi films to unveil something far more intricate with 2023’s Asteroid City, so who knows what Anderson’s good old spy movie could secretly be a Trojan horse for?

One early report we did hear suggested that for this film, Wes Anderson would be scaling back his cast and not working in the same ensemble-driven way that he so often does. That report now looks like it could have been wide of the mark (or perhaps things simply evolved) as the full cast list for the film has now been released and well,...

Newly minted Oscar winner Wes Anderson has now wrapped production on his next feature, The Phoenician Scheme, in Germany. We’ve known the story of a family and a family business, specifically capturing a father-daughter relationship in a dark espionage tale, has a cast that features Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera, Bill Murray, Mia Threapleton, and Riz Ahmed. Now the full ensemble has been unveiled, featuring many familiar faces from the director’s cinematic universe.

Anderson’s recent Asteroid City collaborators Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, and Bryan Cranston have joined, according to a German crew posting, as has his Henry Sugar star Benedict Cumberbatch. Charlotte Gainsbourg, a newcomer to the world of Wes Anderson, will be playing “first wife” in the film, presumably in relation to Benicio del Toro’s character. On the crew side, along with the previously announced cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, production designer Adam Stockhausen...