Asteroid City & Wes Through The Year

By Biff Whipster    August 2, 2024

    As I watched Asteroid City for the first time tonight,

I wondered to myself “How meta can you go?” And should you?

    If The French Dispatch was Wes Anderson's love letter to journalism, and art, then Asteroid City is his love letter to the stage and the author. More specifically, the relationship of the author and his subjects. It is rife with Andersonisms, it’s heart on its sleeve,  and tongue planted thoroughly in cheek.

    As I watched, I began to wonder what “period” this would be for Anderson, and undoubtedly it would be his “meta period”. Anderson’s mainstream audience appeal began to peak  with The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic. It’s around this time that a new Wes Anderson film would be greeted with joy by his fans, mixed regards from the media, and with derision from those that criticize him for becoming a caricature of himself (which isn’t an entirely unfair criticism). A filmbro cliche.

    Anderson’s visual style became so acute, that it began to have diminishing returns with mass audiences. This wasn’t a difficult path to foresee if you’ve been a fan of his work, but today I’d like to briefly examine Andersons evolution as an auteur, and the different stages of change in his style.

Style vs. Substance

    If you look at Bottle Rocket, as Anderson’s first film, and lowest budget, it has very little of what would become Wes Anderson’s signature style. What it  does establish is Anderson’s themes and characterizations. 

    In Rushmore we start to see Anderson’s visual flair. Not just in the diegetic stage plays from lead character Max Fischer, but we start to see a lot of visual flairs that become regular parts of his directing arsenal. Rushmore also centers on themes that would resonate throughout his filmography. Primarily the joy and hubris of youth, juxtaposed with the melancholic aimlessness of aging.

    The Royal Tenenbaums brings us to the end of what I think of as Anderson’s formative years. It brings us all of the themes and archetypes we’ve seen from him previously, but he has fully found his…voice, as it were. Here for the first time we see Anderson take absolute control over everything from design, to mise en scene, his use of planimetric staging, and color palettes. He has created an exaggerated version of our world. This happens to be my favorite of his films. One of my favorites in general actually.

Growing Up Green

With  The Life Aquatic Anderson leans more heavily into his exaggerated world, using bisected sets, claymation, and more to bring us further into his heightened reality, while deeply exploring intergenerational drama.

The Life Aquatic is often cited as a fan favorite, and while The Darjeeling Limited is considered one of his lesser films by fans, it’s also one of his most moving films. It explores similar themes to The Life Aquatic, bit it is perhaps Andersons most real film since Bottle Rocket. It also marks Anderson’s first collaboration with Adrian Brody  (who, post-Oscar win, cannot seem to give a decent performance without the aid of Anderson, truly) 

Both of these films have a very distinct and heavy yellow and aqua marine color palette.

Family Matters

Anderson's next film is a bit of a departure with The Fantastic Mr. Fox. An adaptation of the book by Roald Dahl. This is Anderson's first adaptation of someone else's work, and Roald Dahl is a quirky match made in heaven. Two quirky peas in a quirky, self-aware quirky pod. The stop motion is fantastic as well. One of his funnest and breeziest films.

Back into live action and original story, we have Moonrise Kingdom, which is criminally underrated. While familiar tropes of disaffected youth, and their worn-down aged counterparts, this like Mr. Fox is a story about family, and the family we choose.

Full-Blown Wes

The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson dropping the pretense, and inviting us into a wholly fictional world for the first time. This is not heightened reality, this is a fully formed fictional world, with fictional countries, and fictional currencies. It is perhaps the most Wes Anderson film, and a close second favorite for me.

    

Isle Of Dogs is Anderson's second foray into feature length stop motion, this time giving the treatment to a story of his own. It’s tonally quite different than his other films, but touches a lot of his normal themes.

Full Meta Jacket

Now we arrive at Wes Anderson in final form with The French Dispatch. This is very much steeped in reality, but through the incredibly romanticized rose glasses that Anderson wears. It’s a love letter to print media, to art, and to culture. 

And with Asteroid City Anderson gives us a compelling look at the theater, and the relationship between author/actor, and character. This phase of his career seems to be telling stories about storytelling.

Valley Of The Dahls

Last but not least, we get to Anderson’s Netflix project (and Oscar nominee), The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar and Three More. This is a series of short adaptations of four more Roald Dahl stories, in live action this time. These are terrific little shorts, and show once again what a match made in heaven Wes Anderson and Roald Dahl is.

Where To Captain?

With his next feature The Phoenician Scheme in post production, time will tell how Anderson will evolve down the line, but I for one, am here for it.