Writer-director Wes Anderson has faced about a half decade of critical backlash—but you wouldn’t know it from the enthusiastic response to his latest trailer. When we posted it here on Thursday, hundreds of readers shared it within minutes. Most fans have seemed overjoyed. (Jason Kottke declared, “It’s Wes Andersonmas, y’all!”) Still, a significant minority declared it “self-parody.”
This is the most common critique of Anderson’s work: that over time his meticulous stylistic tics have crowded out all emotional substance. The word dollhouse is thrown around, connoting not just the minute attention Anderson bestows upon his sets and costume design, but also the opinion that he’s a bit "girlish"—that he needs to confront the real world, maybe get down in the dirt or work with his hands. (Perhaps it’s time to make a war movie?) In short: Grow up.
For the slide show below, we’ve identified several of the signature elements of a Wes Anderson film, checked off the extent to which each has appeared in each of his previous trailers, and assembled the results. From this, we’ve attempted to measure, scientifically, the extent to which the Moonrise Kingdom trailer represents Anderson’s development, arrested or otherwise.
By Its Title
For many movie fans, each Wes Anderson film seems even more Andersonian than the last. When the trailer for his latest, Moonrise Kingdom, debuted on Thursday, many commenters even declared it "self-parody." This slide show attempts to chart out why each Anderson film feels increasingly familiar, and to what extent the filmmarker has evolved, or simply solidified his style.
It's revealing that Wes Anderson is a filmmaker who can be identified as much from his overarching themes as from his favorite typeface. While the trailer for Bottle Rocketfeatures the surprising inclusion of serifs (one presumes Anderson had not yet earned final cut on his promotional materials), again and again Anderson has returned to sans serif fonts like his signature Futura.
Here Moonrise Kingdom's calligraphic lettering marks a striking departure, as manydesignandtypographyblogs rushed to note.
Many auteurs provide their imprimatur in the form of a signature shot, and Anderson's is widely agreed upon to be the slow-motion tracking shots with which he ends his films. Fantastic Mr. Fox is the first Wes Anderson film not to end with one of these shots, though from the trailer for Moonrise Kingdom, in which such a shot appears under the title, it appears that he'll once again close with his signature.
Anderson is also known for his frequent collaborators. While Moonrise Kingdom will see Anderson work with several actors for the first time (including the two young leads, who are making their screen debut, plus Hollywood veterans like Bruce Willis, Tilda Swinton, and Edward Norton), it also marks his sixth collaboration with Bill Murray (with whom Anderson has worked with on every film since Rushmore), and his fourth collaboration with Jason Schwartzman.
Even the manner in which Anderson credits his stars rings familiar—ever since The Royal Tenenbaums, they've generally been presented one by one in the center of the frame, staring at or in the direction of the camera, with their name laid over their chest.
While both Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray will appear in Moonrise Kingdom, fans might be concerned by the conspicuous absence of Owen Wilson. Wilson co-wrote each of Anderson's first three films, and has appeared in every Anderson movie except for Rushmore. In his 2005 Slate essay "The O Factor," Field Maloney argued that Wilson's pen was the key to the more grounded excellence of Anderson's first three films.
Stars and typefaces aside, Anderson might actually be most famous for his music. While the trailer features none of the British 1960s rock with which Anderson made his reputation as cinema's new jukebox tastemaker, the selection of Françoise Hardy's “Le Temps de L’Amour” to close the trailer is in keeping with Anderson's increasing affection for French pop.
Similarly, while Anderson's first four films were scored by Devo alum Mark Mothersbaugh, Moonrise Kingdom will be the second collaboration between the director and French composer Alexandre Desplat.
Less frequently noted, but just as pervasive, is Anderson's use of symmetrical framing. These compositions are particularly noticeable when his characters are lined up facing the camera, as he often positions them at the dinner table.
Perhaps as a joke on the highbrowness of Anderson's influences, the trailer for Moonrise Kingdom gives one possible source for these compositions: The framing of one shot is an homage to Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper.
Another common Anderson composition is the overhead shot, often employed to look straight down on a desk top or a book. This God's eye view emphasizes the sense that Anderson's camera sees everything.
While Tenenbaum's omniscient narration is novelistic, the tendency to present key settings in cross-section (one more reason writers refer to his "dollhouse" compositions) is theatrical.
Plays and theater curtains also appear in his films. The sight of a theater in Moonrise Kingdom might conjure up Max Fischer's cinematic plays in Rushmore, the curtained presentation of Steve Zissou's films in Life Aquatic, or Margot Tenenbaum's productions in The Royal Tenenbaums. Anderson is nothing if not a showman.
Some of the shots that make Moonrise Kingdom seem so familiar might hit us more subconsciously. Anderson seems fond of planting his camera tightly on the roof of moving vehicles, as seen in these three shots taken from the roof of a sea copter in The Life Aquatic, the titular train in The Darjeeling Limited, and what seems to be an ambulance in Moonrise Kingdom.
Anderson's films are littered with children's adventure toys: walkie talkies, BB guns, binoculars. Looking through binoculars, of course, allows you to see something more like a single image (not two circles). However, Anderson seems more interested in cinematic tradition—this shot was popularized by filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, who used it in Rear Window—than in realism.
Of course, Anderson's interest in these adventure toys is only one expression of his larger interest in children—and adults who behave like children. Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's first film to put children front and center, but as these shots above illustrate, this is not entirely unexpected. All of Anderson's films focus on childish adults and children who are beyond their years (or who at least think they are). They seem to suggest that just about everyone is the same mental age.
These days Anderson gets to slap his name at the end of just about every trailer—no matter the stars, he's the main attraction—but that hasn't always been the case. In the trailers for Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, there was no title card for Anderson, and for The Royal Tenenbaums there's only "From the Creators of Rushmore."
Nowadaways the "Directed by Wes Anderson" title is just a formality. As if you didn't already know.
After hitting his critical peak somewhere between Rushmoreand The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson’s star has fallen steadily ever since. Even Fantastic Mr. Fox—which many exempted on the grounds that it was a stop-motion adaption of a children’s book, and so an appropriate opportunity for a director to play with dolls—seemed in part a defense of quirk. (The movie’s titular line concludes: “We’re all different. Especially [Mr. Fox]. But there’s something kind of fantastic about that, isn’t there?”)
Auteurs are usually allowed their signature shots—all but one of Anderson’s films ends with a slow-motion shot of walking—but with Anderson it sometimes seems every aspect of his style has become a signature. 1960s British and European rock, snap zooms and whip pans, overhead shots of books and workspaces, the presence of precocious children and Bill Murray, and on and on. (Indeed, breaking down Anderson’s style has become something of a national pastime: Yesterday, IndieWire posted a similar breakdown of the Moonrise Kingdom trailer, just as we were finalizing our own.)
A comparison can be made with Quentin Tarantino, whom critics have also accused of being all style and no substance. But the backlash with Anderson has been more severe. Why? Perhaps because Anderson’s influence has been even more pervasive than Tarantino’s. But that’s not all. Anderson’s influences are generally more highbrow and often more obscure, which can read less like sheer enthusiasm and more like snobbery. His movies can also feel troublingly white and decidedly upper (or at least upper-middle) class. But even when Anderson tries something new, like making a period film, or working with child leads, the loudest groans arise from the sense that each Wes Anderson film is even more Andersonian than the last. It’s that claim that we wanted to give a closer look.
