After making the move from cult outsider to mainstream master with last year's The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson has finally revealed details of his long-awaited next project – and it's set to be a return to the world of stop-motion animation.

Much like first foray into the genre, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, the film will focus on animals – though at this stage any other details are being kept tightly under wraps. All that's really known, according to reports in The Playlist, is that it's in production, and that it's probably going to be about dogs. No badgers, foxes or other furry woodland things – just dogs.

It may be a very conscious decision from the director, who has come under fire for killing off canines in several of his films. In 2012, the The New Yorker even published a joke article on the subject, titled: ‘Does Wes Anderson Hate Dogs?’

“I've killed dogs before in my work and it never goes over that lightly,” Anderson explained after killing off yet another pooch in Moonrise Kingdom. “In (The Royal Tenenbaums) we had a car run over one but you just saw the leash.”

Anderson is also rumoured to be linked to another project, known only at this stage as a “vaguely avant-garde” collaboration with Moonrise Kingdom writer Roman Coppola. There's a serious emphasis is on the “vague” though.

“(It's) very complicated,” he told The Playlist last year. “I'm not even sure if it even is a movie. But hopefully it is... It's a little bit vaguely avant-garde in its concept and I'm just not sure if it's going to quite gel.”

“It's a thing where maybe there’s many things happening at once,” he added. “That could be my tease.”