Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson’s reality looks like it’s been through a deforming lens: his obsessive care for the forestage of his scenes and the composition of every single frame is conducive to the understanding of the anxieties and paranoia of the modern world. It all does look a bit like a children’s show, despite the content: colours, animated sequences interspersed in the live action, the reveal of the production set up looking like a TV studio for sit-coms – all are recurring visual themes of Anderson’s.
The characters often have dramatic lives and are made to face grotesque, extremely unlikely scenarios while we follow their inner growth, unpredictable scene after unpredictable scene.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, inspired by the life of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, is the protagonist’s hyperbolic, picaresque journey between shootouts and immersions into a plastic ocean full of weird sea monsters towards his inner self and a long-hidden paternal instinct.
His successful feature The Royal Tenenbaums is a peculiar representation of the American dream and of the twisted and crooked society where appearances are all that counts, while nuclear families get torn apart. Among his animated films, Isle of Dogs of 2018 stands out: it is the tragicomical epic of a child looking for his dog in a lazaret-like island where, due to a pandemic, all dogs in Japan are taken.