Basis Design

Wes Anderson movies, apart from their charm, their ironically barbed New Yorker humor, and their endearing human quality, are a tour de force of set design, presentation, framing, and costume choices. There is no director working in America or across the globe whose sense of style, whose taste for design, so completely and beautifully informs his work.

Recently Anderson’s latest creation, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, was released on DVD, and second and third viewings of his thrilling and original use of animation and stop-motion photography are well worth the cost. The dollhouse-level control and placement of detail, the use of symmetry and the emphasis on balanced compositions within wide-screen formatting, in addition to the ubiquitous dolly shots, long takes and focused, mid-shot slow motion effects used without exception in all of his films, mark him not only as the American cinemas premier auteur, but also as that rare director whose style is so personal, so pervasive, and so beguiling, that it becomes a kind of cinematic prose. Anderson’s films are so good they’re literature, and there is no higher complement that can be paid to a director reared in the French New Wave, and riding the crest of the American.

The proof in the proverbial pudding:

Some of these may seem a little familiar to lovers of the Anderson oeuvre. They are in fact semi-photographic archetypes; they speak to the way he likes to frame families, performances, and offices. More compositional brilliance here:

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Rushmore

Bottle Rocket

The Darjeeling Limited