I am looking forward to seeing this, as while I really enjoy the aesthetic of Anderson, I increasingly wish someone would push him out of his comfort zone. His films are the same thing repeated in different circumstances with different characters.
Maybe he isn’t interested in doing anything other than what he’s doing, and at some level that’s all the justification he needs. He doesn’t owe anyone anything. But I do think the cinematic world as a whole would benefit from him experimenting a little more, trying a novel format, and so on.
He has put out 5 films in the last 7 years. Wes Anderson might just be a victim of his own productivity, his work could benefit from some scarcity.
Anderson nonetheless is still quite inventive and experimental in his films, he's always doing new things, and usually those new things are in the details, and of course, those new things tend to play into his trademark style. Asteroid City played like an excuse to play around with clever camera movements. Isle of Dogs did weird things where the image and sound were providing diverging narratives that would come back together.
Anderson's trademark style is annoying to me only when my interest in the characters and story is lacklustre, but for every Anderson film I'm not that into I know at least one person who loves it.
I think it would be unreasonable to expect him to reinvent his filmmaking style dramatically. There are other filmmakers out there making movies for those who've had their fill of quirky Wes Anderson flicks.
>His films are the same thing repeated in different circumstances with different characters.
I am not sure what you mean, Asteroid City with its complex structure utilizing metafiction to explore things mostly removed from the characters and the story does not have much in common with The Royal Tenenbaums other than aesthetic with its fairly simple and direct use of character to explore the individual and family. Do you want him to make a superhero or action movie or something?
When you go see an Anderson film, you have a pretty solid idea of what you’re going to get. The mood, character development, cinematography, quirkiness, and pretty much everything else is largely the same across his films. I think this is obvious (?) to most people. Yes, there are individual differences between films, but I don’t think my opinion is an uncommon one.
There are more genres than action and superhero. A whole world of cinema, in fact. So it would be great if Anderson took his formidable skills and tried something new. A selfish request from a viewer, sure, but I just never feel like he’s trying to improve as a filmmaker and is merely doing what is comfortable to him.
Just to add to your sentiment, I agree with you. The setup of his films became so similar to each other in many ways, same quirky (slightly insane) characters, same pastel colors, same textures. All subjective of course, but I found his later movies soulless and hard to watch.
Agreed. He’s like those amazing musicians who keep using the same chords, instruments, arrangement, and lyrical content over and over.
What I wouldn’t give to see Anderson tackle something really novel (for him). A period-piece tragedy; a college road trip; a horror film.
>The mood, character development, cinematography, quirkiness
Other than character development those are all part of the aesthetic and in his last two he mostly extended that aesthetic directly to the characters, dropped the essentially realistic relatable characters and turned them into caricatures who don't really develop; devices of the story and theme instead of what drives the story and develops theme. I would say he was doing things uncomfortable for him with The French Dispatch, which is why he did not quite pull off the meta aspect. I think his interests are in improving on story and narrative and exploring what can be done with them within the medium and his aesthetic is a means to those ends, a way to push things out of the normal perspectives and give him more room to do things like make highly metafictional films without going all out experimental.
I am perfectly aware there are other genres.
Same for Nolan's movies.
I liked that in Oppenheimer, even though the plot of the movie was a similar sort of high stakes mystery heist movie, instead of the macguffin being a random piece of metal like it was in tenet, its the literal atom bomb. For that reason I enjoyed it more than some of his other movies.
I would enjoy a Wes Anderson movie that just moved the whole aesthetic over to something new. It can still be a Wes Anderson movie but just different in one important new dimension.
The Dark Knight Rises also had an atom bomb. Nolan has a thing for nuclear detonations.
also, timers. What absolutely killed Nolan for me was when someone pointed out that he's virtually unable to create tension without a literal timer, be that bombs, watches, countdowns, what have you. Ever single damn movie. There's even a tick-tock sound from Nolan's stopwatch in the soundtrack of Dunkirk.
For some reason, this made me think of the countdown timer in Galaxy Quest that counts down but stops before getting to zero because the ship's design is based on a TV show.
"Spoiler alert", I guess, if you've not seen Galaxy Quest in the quarter century since it was released.
Which, if you haven't, you absolutely should!
You can edit your comments. I didn't reply to your second one so you can delete it if you want.
It was sarcasm. 25 year old movies don't need spoiler alerts.
But also, in a meta way, it wasn't a spoiler anyway because countdowns never reach zero anyway.
Except in Oppenheimer he was like, I'll just do the actual atom bomb instead. I'm glad that he knows himself well enough that he went right to the source.
The remark "Do you want him to make a superhero or action movie or something?" implies that any desire for Anderson to evolve beyond his current style stems from a limited understanding of cinema, rather than a genuine wish for artistic expansion. Imo this rhetorical question can be seen as an attempt to dismiss the critique by framing it as unsophisticated. I found it a little condescending.
You are making assumptions about my intent and my feelings regarding superhero and action movies. I am not sure I would call most of Anderson's output particularly sophisticated and absolutely would not write off entire genres as unsophisticated, many dramas offer nothing more than an emotional appeal and many action movies offer considerably more.
There was nothing rhetorical about my question.
It certainly didn't sound like it was an actual question.
Can't think of any real consequence to taking it at face value, so why assume the worst?
Haven't seen Asteroid City, but metafiction and exploration of side-plots removed from the characters are absolutely present in Tenenbaums (presented as a book with chapters) and Grand Budapest Hotel. I guess to a lesser degree.
Sure, most people trivialise his "quirkiness" in annoying ways (there is depth and poetry in some of his movies that go beyond eye-pleasing symmetry) but the guy could take a risk or two, artistically speaking. His Fantastic Mr Fox was charming, and switching to animation is not at all easy for a live-action director!
Before The French Dispatch his use of meta was just a side effect of the style, it broke the fourth wall which you can call meta but it is sort of meaningless if all it does is break the forth wall. In the French Dispatch and Asteroid City he develops it and uses it towards theme, we can not fully understand them without taking in account the meta.
There are many common factors to all of his films and not a lot of change in those common factors. Especially because many of them are rather unique to him the continued variation on the same artistic themes gets a bit tired.
Honest Trailers - Every Wes Anderson Movie
>But I do think the cinematic world as a whole would benefit from him experimenting a little more, trying a novel format, and so on.
But his format is novel in the entire world of cinema right now, even if it doesn't change from film to film. People go to see a Wes Anderson film for the same reason Marvel fans line up for the next blockbuster; you know what you are going to get, and you want more of it. He takes it to the extreme in this one, where it works entirely visually as an almost homage to the days of silent film. We would benefit greatly from more filmmakers (and studios willing to take them on) who have such a defined aesthetic vision and are able to develop it over such a long a period, rather than just mashing together whatever expectations a focus group might have, or going off on flights of fancy that have little artistic continuity.
For better or for worse, Anderson is very much an auteur [0], like Godard or Woody Allen. Almost certainly in a self-conscious way.
Complaining that Anderson movies feel like Anderson movies seems almost to miss the point: do we look at Picasso's works and complain about the consistent style he developed? The self-imposed constraints of his own style give him a framework to build his art from (it's often said that constraints foster creativity after all) and a particular craft to master.
Conversely, the form might always be an Anderson movie, but the function of each film can be quite different. By sticking with and mastering a particular aesthetic he frees himself to explore things besides aesthetic wildly. What does The Royal Tenenbaums have in common with, say, The Grand Budapest Hotel, besides Futura?
That said, I do feel like Asteroid City in particular was a stretch for him: there's nothing quite like "you can't wake up if you don't fall asleep" anywhere else in his filmography. It felt like along with the more extreme artifice came a more extreme intensity of feeling: to me it's a film that really came from a very anguished and grieving place. I haven't read the article or seen the new film yet, but based on the headline it sounds like this might be the overall direction his work is heading.
Both Picasso and Godard changed their style dramatically over their careers. I'm not familiar enough with Woody Allen's movies to comment on them.
These are good examples to show how being an auteur doesn't mean you need to stick to the same stereotypical aesthetic. Anderson is still pretty young, so maybe he is shifting in one direction or another. But as far as his work goes as of today, the range of stylistic choices is far, far less than what Picasso or Godard did in their careers.
The stylistic evolution of Picasso and Godard over time is undeniable, but I think it’s also worth considering that Anderson is working in a medium that isn’t just visual, but also narrative, thematic, sonic, and performative. His evolution as an artist is not truly represented by his shifts in color palettes, framing, or editing technique, but you can see it in the emotional territory he explores, the narrative structures he experiments with. While he stays within his own unique aesthetic framework, he is pushing against the boundaries within it.
Asteroid City, for example, is doing something genuinely different, not just in tone, but in structure, layering fiction and grief in a way that feels disorienting and profound. And while his style is often imitated or parodied, nobody else is actually making movies like his with that particular blend of rigor, melancholy, humor, formality, and precision. We should celebrate having a unique voice and perspective, he's a major part of the diversity of creation, he's way outside the boiled-down average the rest of the industry pushes towards.
Anderson is also not dead yet so still creating.
Picasso didn't have evolution so much as total overhauls at several points. It seems much harder to do this kind of evolution/revolution in film simply because of the money involved.
As a film director with such a distinct style, which makes money, it would be pretty hard to go to your investors and say 'I want to do something totally different.' and secure enough money to make a film in the modern era. There are some directors who can self fund due to windfalls in the past. I mean thinking back on noted auteurs I can only think of a film or two that are outside of their style and most are either very early in their career when maybe they were doing a work for hire or very late in their career where they had enough gravitas to get the money to try something different that they had been sitting on for many years (David Lynch's Straight Story is a bit of an odd man out though, I'm not sure of the history of that particular film)
But for someone like picasso, he can just decide on even a whim to attempt to refine or invent another style, the market probably has some kind of pull but it seems like, to me, several orders of magnitude lower stakes.
It would be interesting to find out after some film auteurs' death that they actually had done several other films in a wildly different style under whatever the director's equivalent of a pen name is. Though keeping such a thing secret would be highly improbable (too many people involved in a modern film production).
It’s not that you’re completely wrong or anything here, but the simple counter example of other unique directors that also progressed / changed their style over time kind of disproves the idea that this is some inherent aspect of filmmaking.
And certainly I’m glad he’s making movies and I enjoy them (as I said in the initial comment.) That doesn’t mean I need to celebrate every single thing he does and refrain from film criticism.
I think your “simple counter” might be a bit reductive. Artistic evolution can take many forms, but it doesn’t have to take every form, not every distinctive filmmaker needs to reinvent every aspect of their art to demonstrate creative growth.
My point wasn’t that Anderson should be exempt from criticism, just that his growth may register differently because of the kind of storytelling he’s committed to. The evolution in his work often plays out less in surface-level aesthetics and more in structure, emotional depth, and thematic complexity. He clearly enjoys working within a consistent visual language, but that doesn’t mean he’s artistically “stuck”. Critique is always valid, and I think it’s also worth asking whether we’re tuned into the kinds of shifts that matter most in his particular creative vocabulary.
Perhaps the example of Woody Allen at the top is more apt.
The departure in style, theme, visual approach, and structural vision between early works like Sleeper or Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and later films such as Match Point is dramatic. Then again, three decades separate those movies. Anderson still has time.
> Anderson still has time.
Yes, but time for what? I still resist the implication that Anderson is somehow “sitting still” artistically just because he maintains a consistent (and remarkable, and unique) aesthetic. When you engage with his work beyond the surface, there’s clear evolution in structure, tone, emotional depth, and thematic ambition. That doesn't mean everything he's done is a masterpiece, or that not liking it is somehow an invalid critique.
He may still evolve in more outwardly dramatic ways, but I think he has and continue to evolve already, just on his own terms, without compromising the visual language he clearly loves.
I once walked into a room in a museum and felt proud for immediately spotting and identifying a Picasso. It was only a few minutes later that I realised that the entire room was Picassos, all in wildly varying styles, most of which I was completely unfamiliar with. Picasso had range.
In case you haven’t seen it, “Wes Anderson Horror Trailer”: https://youtu.be/gfDIAZCwHQE?si=EzoCvqsY70AcZI4u
He definitely has a unique voice but I think he does challenge himself. Switching to stop motion certainly seems like a challenge. Admittedly he now has a stop motion style.