Wes Anderson And His Influence On Filmmaking

1 Introduction

Wes Anderson, born May 1, 1969 in Houston, Texas, USA, is a US film auteur and screenwriter, and graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in philosophy. In 2018, Wes Anderson won the Best Director Award for the animated film ‘The Island of the Dog’, which was unveiled at the 68th Berlin Film Festival.

Wes Anderson is known as an ‘all-rounder’ in Hollywood. He is fully involved in all aspects of filmmaking, including scriptwriting, photography, art design, soundtrack, etc. It is a typical all-rounder, a very personal style of film aesthetics. In the commercial film market is absolutely unique.

We also refer to Wes Anderson as a successful auteur, attributed to his ability to control each film. The different filming methods, scene design, complex character, and various intrigues in his films made the director look different.

Wes Anderson’s films are almost about personal freedom and nuclear family relationships. He is very concerned about the story of the film, and the wisdom of taking the essence and discarding it makes his film easy to understand and different. The indescribable temperament in the Wes Anderson film is largely due to a constant tacit understanding.

Wes Anderson’s film style is mainly reflected in the following aspects: color, lens, tribute and metaphor, music, casting (actor), details and fun.

Today we are talking about the color aesthetics in Wes Anderson’s film.

2 ‘The sound is an audible color, and the color is a visible sound.’

Color is the soul of art works. As the culture develops, people’s demand for color is more and more unsatisfied. The works with color have the existence of tone. Tone is a physiological phenomenon produced by the human eye and the brain, and is a concentrated expression of color characteristics. The film is one of the important expressions of the role of the color to the extreme, the color is the color soul of the film. Anderson can satisfy all your fantasies about color.

So far, Wes Anderson has directed eight feature films, a black and white short film, two color short films and two advertisements for Prada.

This article analyzes how he uses color from several films.

2.1 The Grand Budapest Hotel

In the movie ‘ The Grand Budapest Hotel ‘, Wes Anderson used the color of sauce purple, pink, orange, blue, red and other colors to create a dream fairy tale kingdom. For example, when it comes to the cable car of the Budapest Hotel, the deer, roofs and mountains of the mountains are covered in pink, just like entering the fairy tale kingdom(as showed in Fig.1). In describing the war, the director used the color picture to display the war scene, giving the war scene a fairy tale color. In addition, when writing Agatha’s love with the doorman, a lot of blue and pink are used(as showed in Fig.2), which makes people feel like the prince and the princess are in love.

Fig.1 Fig.2

The ‘ The Grand Budapest Hotel ‘ film is a theme color for each story, using five main colors, and the color changes to reflect the plot. Moreover, the characters in the movie, the color of the building, and the ambient atmosphere use different colors to tell different stories. For example, at the beginning of the movie, the director chose pink for the exterior of the hotel in order to show the elegance of the hotel, and chose pink for the environment around the hotel, highlighting the elegance and romance of the hotel and giving the hotel its mysterious color. In the description of the prison, dark colors such as black were used to describe the walls of the prison, the trees around the prison and the sky of the prison, giving people a sense of oppression, allowing people to experience the coldness and horror of the prison from the color.

2.2 The Fantastic Mr. Fox

In addition to the ‘ The Grand Budapest Hotel ‘, another movie that has to be said is ‘ The Fantastic Mr. Fox ‘. Wes Anderson’s animated feature film is adapted from a children’s story by an English writer and is said to be the first storybook that Wes read as a child. Wes Anderson has done a remarkable achievement in this animated work, making a child who can understand it, but there is no lack of depth and detail. Although entering the animation world, none of the Wes Anderson features have been lost.

Speaking of the fox, the color that emerges in everyone’s mind is naturally the bright color of the red fox. At the beginning of the story, the harvest season is the beginning of the season(as showed in Fig.3). The whole movie uses a large area of orange yellow when describing the daily life of the fox family. This kind of color tone is the representative color of the fox, and it also shows the joy of the golden autumn harvest(as showed in Fig.4).

When the night fell, the fox father put on another face, clearly a stable income and a happy family, but he was suffering from a middle-aged crisis, and he was impatient to want to show his skills, turning into a chicken thief. Flowing between the big farms. At this time, the cold night and the warm chicken farm formed a strong contrast. On one side is the cold reality, and on the other side is the bright hope. The contrast color tone is used throughout the film to create a tense and contradictory atmosphere.

Fig.3 Fig.4

2.3 Moonrise Kingdom

The film tells the story of a pair of 12-year-old children who fell in love and went to an island on the coast of New England in the summer of 1965. When the entire town mobilized people to look for them, a storm was quietly coming, this calm island town was turned upside down, presenting a grand childhood adventure accompanied by the first love of the young.

Young love, like lemon mint, is fresh and beautiful, just like the warm yellow-green tone of the first half of the film. Deductive sweet emotions like fresh fruit(as showed in Fig.5). The girl Su Shi has more contradictions and family contradictions than the boy Sam, so the Su Shi’s house and her dressing are using a complementary color of yellow and green, creating a sense of conflict with contrasting tones.

Different from previous works, in the case of contradictory conflicts, the director used a picture collage to spread out the contradictory characters. If the sheriff is talking to Sam’s adoptive parents, the attitude of the two groups to the child’s disappearance can be expressed in saturated tones. On the one hand, there is concern about the safety of the child, and on the other side, there is no trouble at all. The tops of the female characters on both sides are the same color number, and the mental state of the right parent is much easier and more pleasant than the left operator. The psychological activities that need to be described in a large section of text can only be revealed through the color tone(as showed in Fig.6).

Fig.5 Fig.6

3 Conclusion

Wes Anderson has a very standard of standards for film photography, art, editing and music, as well as an almost ‘stubborn’ aesthetic execution. This makes all his works very recognizable. His film is like a beautiful tapestry, colorful, symmetrical and abstract geometric beauty, and a very strong decorative style.

Of course, Wes Anderson is not the first director to prefer high-saturation warm colors, and is by no means the only one. In terms of use and dependence, Wes Anderson is far less paranoid and violent than Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie) and Tetsuya Nakashima (Memories of Matsuko). The design of the color is more of a kind of adjustment for him, like the candy that is distributed to the audience of the theater, which is occasionally stunning, but not all.

Wes Anderson uses his unique aesthetic to bring the soul to the audience, which can invisibly guide the viewer to re-examine his life. Redefine the relationship between yourself and the surrounding people and the social environment. When returning from the movie, people can once again take the courage to create a better life and pursue a magnificent life.