Find out why Wes Anderson’s movies are loved by designers

Wes Anderson bagged Best Director at last year’s Berlinale for his new stop-motion feature Isle of Dogs, so we’ve decided to take a look at some of the writer-director’s best works from a visual angle, exploring why he’s gained his reputation as the “King of Symmetry”.

Anderson has never made a bad movie. Period. And while his portfolio is filled with charming storylines, whimsical dialogue, and oddball characters, it’s his visual style that trumps all.

Already inspiring a new generation of filmmakers, Anderson’s aesthetic is characterized by pastel-hue colors, one-point perspectives, and an attention to detail bordering on the obsessive, resulting in movies that – even with the sound off – are a stimulating pleasure to watch.

Meticulous attention to detail

A Wes Anderson movie is instantly recognizable as a Wes Anderson movie; unique set design and attention to prop details abound:

• Rushmore’s hyperbolized handwritten message in the book Diving for Sunken Treasure (written by the character played by the eternally amazing Olivia Williams)
• Chas’s (Ben Stiller) Dalmatian mice in The Royal Tenenbaums
• The handmade dining sets on the train on which the three brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman) travel across India in The Darjeeling Limited

Every Anderson film has its own theme of references: in Rushmore it’s water, in The Royal Tenenbaums it’s animals, in The Darjeeling Limited it’s religious ritual. Such attention to detail is on another level, but it wasn’t until the release of his 2014 adventure dramedy The Grand Budapest Hotel that we found out just how far it goes.

In an interview with Dazed, the movie’s lead graphic designer Annie Atkins revealed that with his eye on every last detail, Anderson even designed and wrote news stories, despite knowing they would never be read.

“Because it’s a fictitious country, you have to create the Trans Alpine Yodel, which was the main daily newspaper, but then Wes also used other newspapers to tell other parts of the story – it was like an entire national press. He wrote the articles, and he wrote some lovely newspaper titles like ‘Continental Drift’ and ‘The Daily Fact’.”

With such a meticulous production, things didn’t always go to plan. In one instance, Atkins revealed a spelling mistake she’d made on the now-infamous Mendl's boxes (of which there were thousands created for the movie).

“I spelled ‘patisserie’ wrong! You need to double-check everything. At this point, we had shot quite a few of the boxes. We’d actually made thousands of them. They had to fix this in post, which was embarrassing. Luckily, Wes is a really nice guy as well as being a genius.”

The art of symmetry

Anderson’s not afraid to admit he takes inspiration from the original master of symmetry, Stanley Kubrick. In fact, for his 2012 drama romance Moonrise Kingdom, he even acknowledges stylistic similarities in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter – but says he’s normally too absorbed in the production to really notice.

“Kubrick is definitely one of my favorites. But usually by the time I’m making a movie, I don’t really know where I’m stealing from. So by the time I make the movie, I think, ‘Oh, this is my thing’.”