We need to talk about Wes Anderson

If you ask anyone what a Wes Anderson film looks like, they'll say that it looks symmetric.

Yet, if you try to make a Wes Anderson rip-off and manage to maintain unparalleled symmetry, you'll still fail miserably.

What then makes a Wes Anderson film, truly Wes Anderson-esque?

Story, all a story

While other directors strive to make the characters as human as possible and conceal the presence of a storyteller, Wes draws attention to it. He has no desire to disguise the fact that this is a movie and that a story is being told. The story in many of his movies is initiated by a narrator telling a story or someone reading a book to someone else.

In Rushmore, he starts and ends the movie with curtains, whereas in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the protagonist's ship is shown as part of a stage in a theatre. Elements such as a storyteller, a book, a curtain or a theatrical set are all his attempts to point out this is all just a story being told.

Characters

His films consist of characters showing contradictory behaviour.

Moonrise Kingdom has kids acting like adults, whereas The Darjeeling Limited and Rushmore have adults acting like kids.

Against Naturalism

One of the most subtle yet crucial aspects of Wes Anderson's filmmaking is planimetric composition. His characters move parallelly in a straight line. The movements can be towards the frame or away from it, but never in an oblique line. Even the whip pans are always 90 or 180 degrees, and the frame is always facing one of the directions of the compass.

This imposes a sense of formality and makes the audience feel like they're watching things happen in an enclosed world from a distance. While other filmmakers try to make the camera move realistically in an attempt to make the audience feel like they're part of the world, Wes almost detached us from it. Thomas Flight's video titled "Why Do Wes Anderson Movies Look Like That?" on YouTube has an amazing take on his filmmaking style.

Emotions

This childlike storytelling and deliberate seclusion of the audience poses another problem -- conveying emotions where necessary. Wes has an unusually quirky take on stories that deal with serious themes and emotions. Then how does he divulge emotions in this childlike enterprise?

He puts a brief pause on his storybook approach. The symmetry, the flat lines, the bold colour palettes are still here. Yet, the subtle touch of artificiality that persists throughout the movie is held back. This instructs you to sit straight and concentrate on the characters being emotional, characters who'd otherwise be rather ridiculous throughout the rest of the film.

Wes Anderson's works are less like movies and more like paintings in motion. While legends like Scorsese and Spielberg might be the last of their kind, Anderson is the only one of his kind.

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