Wes Anderson

A couple weeks ago over thanksgiving break, I forced my Dad to sit and watch one of “my” movies. This basically means a quirky independent movie he’s never heard of before, or a movie without explosions and gruesome death scenes. Although he fell asleep halfway through, we watched The Royal Tenenbaums. I haven’t seen this movie in a couple years so I was excited to watch it again. This time, (since I’ve taken some classes about filmmaking) I noticed a lot of great things.

As usual, Wes Anderson uses a strong color scheme. In Moonrise Kingdom for example there were a lot of green and yellow. In the Life Aquatic there are strong blues and red. In this particular film, there was a strong use of reds. This varies between each scene of course, for example when Luke Wilson’s character tries to commit suicide the tone of the room is blue, which sets the somber mood of the scene and anticipates something bad is going to happen.

Also, there always seems to be a narrator in his films. Whether they are physically in the movie or just their voice is heard, the movies are always being told by someone outside of the plot that the characters don’t know exist. Although it can be annoying at times, it is also a comic relief and is used to pay attention to detail of the characters. This is shown clearly in The Royal Tenenbaums, where the narrator (Alec Baldwin) spends most of the beginning of the film solely describing he characters. I find this a good way to get the audience connected with the characters and understand their background better, even if this put my Dad to sleep. 

I thoroughly enjoy his films although they are a little off beat and usually end up with a two people running away.