When it comes to the stylized quirkiness and off-the-wall humor, there is one filmmaker who stands out among all others, and that is the inimitable writer and director Wes Anderson. From a mischievous child due to his parent’s broken marriage, Wesley “Wes” Wales Anderson turned his energies from mischief-making to artistic endeavours. The young Anderson directed movies starring himself and his brothers (Eric and Mel), filming them with a Super 8mm camera.

Anderson was an avid reader, developing a passion for novels and finding himself consumed by storytelling. Anderson attended St. John’s School in Houston, where he was popular for his large and complex play productions. Often these productions were based on well-known stories, films, and even TV shows. One such work was a sock puppet version of the 1978 Kenny Rogers album, The Gambler.

In the late 1980s, at the University of Texas while pursuing his philosophy major Anderson met Owen Wilson, who has been a writing partner or cast member in almost every film Anderson has made since. Looking back at the friendship while speaking to Interview Magazine in 2009, the director said: “We started talking about writers, but also talked about movies right off the bat.” Saying that the due shared similar interest, Anderson added: “I knew I wanted to do something with movies. I don’t know if he had realized yet that it was an option.” The two eventually became roommates and worked on a script for a full-length movie they called “Bottle Rocket” which was released in 1996.

“Wes is only getting more Wes-like. (His first films) ‘Bottle Rocket’ and ‘Rushmore’ are practically naturalistic compared to where he’s at now. Where will it end?” said Sophie Monks Kaufman, who wrote a book about him, “Close-Ups: Wes Anderson”.

Anderson chose to direct mostly fast-paced comedies marked by more serious or melancholic elements, with themes often centered on grief, loss of innocence, dysfunctional families, parental abandonment, adultery, sibling rivalry, and unlikely friendships. His movies have been noted for being unusually character-driven, and by turns both derided and praised with terms like “literary geek chic”. The plots of his movies often feature thefts and unexpected disappearances, with a tendency to borrow liberally from the caper genre. “Moonrise Kingdom,” for example, deals with the pen-pal relationship between two adolescents and their decision to run away together. Most of the movie is about the tediousness of summer camp and adolescent woe — the kind of everyday emotions happily left behind by most in middle school. “Moonrise Kingdom” is just weird enough to make for a story, but the premise itself is not wholly out of the ordinary. Anderson specializes in this particular dichotomy: stories that reflect real life like a funhouse mirror, a resemblance stretched at the edges a centimeter or two beyond believability. He speaks clearly and rapidly, with a disarming blend of serenity and intensity; his ideas spiral out in an avid yet smoothly flowing rush.

His desire to write stories, rather than to show them, is clear throughout his filmography. All ten of Anderson’s films are utterly bizarre, and all read with a distinctive narrative style that belies a director who does not view a film as a film at all, but rather as a novel that unfolds itself across a screen.

When it comes to cinema, of all the elements of visual design, colour may be the most difficult to understand in how it psychologically affects humans and there comes Wes Anderson with his whimsical colour palettes. Anderson follows a common aesthetic “guideline” in portraying themes that are intrinsically similar in value. “[His] films are cinematic dollhouses: their wonder is in the perfection of their recreation of the larger world outside their frames” (Austerlitz, 2010). Anderson has been noted for extensive use of flat space camera moves, symmetrical compositions, knolling, snap-zooms, slow-motion walking shots, a deliberately limited colour palette, and hand-made art direction often utilizing miniatures. These stylistic choices give his movies a highly distinctive quality that has provoked much discussion, critical study, supercuts, mash-ups, and even parody. Many writers, critics, and even Anderson himself has commented that this gives his movies the feel of being “self-contained worlds,” or a “scale model household”.

Anderson meticulously crafts his visual imagery for the screen so that an audience recognizes the intent of his work as a director, a distinct directorial style that has garnered him fame and notoriety in recent years. Visually, Anderson takes every detail into account, be it geometry, colours, or prop placement. His Instagram handle @accidentallywesanderson, which boasts almost one million followers, has dedicated itself entirely to photographs that mimic the director’s style: pictures with two or three pastel colours, flawless symmetry, and an odd sense of perspective. Many of Anderson’s films — particularly “Moonrise Kingdom,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” — feature shots that seem to project directly from the gaze of the viewer, like an augmented virtual-reality experience.

Anderson’s soundtracks each have an overarching theme, whether it’s the bohemian New York of Tenenbaums or Moonrise Kingdom’s clash of Benjamin Britten’s comfortingly neat, didactic classical compositions for kids and Hank Williams’ messily emotional, and adult country songs. But these mixtapes aren’t time capsules. Anderson frequently uses pop music from the 1960s and 1970s on the soundtracks of his films, and one band or musician tends to dominate each soundtrack. Rushmore prominently featured Cat Stevens and British Invasion groups; The Royal Tenenbaums featured Nico; The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, David Bowie, including both originals and covers performed by Seu Jorge; The Darjeeling Limited and Rushmore, the Kinks; Fantastic Mr. Fox, the Beach Boys. The Darjeeling Limited also borrowed music styles from Satyajit Ray’s films. The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is mostly set in the 1930s, is notable for being the first Anderson film to eschew using any pop music, and instead used original music composed by Alexandre Desplat. The magic of Wes Anderson’s music has little to do with fidelity to a particular genre or era—it’s in the way strange and familiar sounds flow together to form the emotional landscapes of his films.

Anderson’s renown as a director was sealed in 2000, when, at the age of thirty, on the basis of his first two films, “Bottle Rocket” (1996) and “Rushmore” (1998), he was named “the next Scorsese,” by Martin Scorsese himself, writing in Esquire. Scorsese was right in one respect: Anderson’s first films, like Scorsese’s, introduced to cinema a new tone, an original mood. Anderson’s cinematic influences include François Truffaut, Louis Malle, Pedro Almodóvar, Satyajit Ray, John Huston, Mike Nichols, Hal Ashby, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles, and Roman Polanski. Anderson has a unique directorial style that has led several critics to consider him an auteur.

After over two decades after his first film “Bottle Rocket,” Anderson is a pillar of the film industry, one of few directors whose films appear in theatres both big and small. He has found the overlap of the relatable and the unfathomable, the beautiful and ugly, and he has made an indelible impact on an ever-changing, perpetually-unimpactful industry.

All images are collected from internet sources