![“the wiz kid director
manages to pass
himself off as a
precociously gifted
child, curious to see
what he can do with
his fancy toy theater
and all the funny
figures that go with it.”
[8]
Intro](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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Wes anderson auteur project
- 1. The Family Unit in Wes Anderson’s films The Royal Tenembaums, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox
- 2. “the wiz kid director manages to pass himself off as a precociously gifted child, curious to see what he can do with his fancy toy theater and all the funny figures that go with it.” [8] Intro
- 3. “That's the kind of movie that I like to make, where there is an invented reality and the audience is going to go someplace where hopefully they've never been before. The details, that's what the world is made of.” - Wes Anderson Background
- 4. “An artist [Anderson] who imprints his personality and preoccupations on his work so strongly that whatever the contributions of his collaborators, he deserves to be considered the primary author of the film” [9] Auteur
- 5. “I have my own rules, and they’re not rules that I made in order to achieve a certain effect; they’re sort of genetic” – Wes Anderson Links between life/film
- 6. "I want to try not to repeat myself. But then I seem to do it continuously in my films. It's not something I make any effort to do. I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience. I feel I get criticized for style over substance, and for details that get in the way of the characters. But every decision I make is how to bring those characters forward.“ - Wes Anderson Anderson’s own style
- 7. “ultimate premise of the auteur theory is concerned with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art.” [25]
- 8. “While this isn’t a world you would like to inhabit, it’s one that you find hard to leave” [18] The Royal Tenenbaums
- 9. “This movie is a very personal movie; everything comes from my experiences, or Jason's or Roman's experiences. That was really our goal and it's always been important to us that's it's both personal to us and hopefully personal for other people.”- Wes Anderson The Darjeeling Limited
- 10. “My only effort was one, to try to make it seem to me like Roald Dahl and then to make it as fun and energetic and interesting as it could be”[23] Fantastic Mr. Fox
- 11. “so rich and charming, that straight out laughter seems beside the point” [8]
Editor's Notes
- Wes Anderson is an American film director from Texas. Anderson has a very unique style of bright colours, eccentric characters and attention to detail. The droll existential comedies that he is famous for often present the same recurrent themes of sibling rivalry (Bottle Rocket), Forbidden Love (Moonrise Kingdom) and parental abandonment. His films show similarities in the way they present Family units. The films The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited both share connotations of family life, displaying family as a broken social norm’. Fantastic Mr. Fox however, is different as it shows a much more positive unit.
- Born May 1st 1969, Anderson was brought up in Houston, by both his parents with two brothers. When he was 8, Anderson’s parents divorced, an event he has often described as “The most crucial event of my brothers and my growing up” [19]. This caused him to act up in school. Anderson attended a private school, where he became known for his large play productions based on well know stories. After graduation, Anderson went on to study at the University of Texas where he met Owen Wilson. The pair began making films together, starting with Bottle Rocket. To this day Anderson still uses the same cast and crew members [22], the first example of a family unit in his films.
- Is Wes Anderson an auteur? There is critical debate over this question but in my opinion he is because in his films he uses his own experiences, is heavily involved in editing and production and has he his own unique style.
- A lot of Anderson’s life is reflected in the films he makes, not always consciously. He says “everything gets run through the same operating system” [9]. For example the character of Ethel in The Royal Tenenbaums is very similar to his mother. They were both archaeologists and Anderson says that they both had the same approach to raising children [8]. Ethel even wears Anderson’s own mother’s glasses in the film.Anderson also uses his own family experiences in his films. He says that when writing a story they are “a big part of what you’ve got to work with” [22]. His films [1] [2] show broken families and themes of loss and neglect. Growing up, his parents’ divorce hit him hard and as they both had busy jobs, neither of them could be there for him in the way he expected. The opening of The Royal Tenenbaums demonstrates this, in the scene where Royal is telling his children that their parents are breaking up. There are three children (like Anderson and his two brothers) sitting at one end of a long empty table - in a formation of three, like a triangle showing unity, with Royal at the other end. The table shows the divide between them; Royal a rational adult, and the children, learning what adults are really like.
- Anderson also has a very unique style of filmmaking. His films are very ‘unpredictable’ and ‘exaggerated’ [8] much like family life can be. There is a severe lack of father figures in Anderson’s films. For example their dead father in The Darjeeling Limited, or Royal leaving in The Royal Tenenbaums. However Anderson admits that this is the opposite of what he grew up with “I’m drawn to those father-figure characters that are larger-than-life people, but they’re not my father” [19]. You could suggest that Anderson is compensating for his good family life, despite his parents’ divorce, by creating characters whose families are not so ideal. Anderson’s films contemplate on prosaic adult versions of childish discontents. The realisation that your parents aren’t quite who you want them to be or that you never grow up to fulfill your dreams. He uses a “cartoonish” [8] style to show these adult messages, this mix of adult feelings to a child is something that the audience can relate to, and links very heavily to Andersons own childhood.I would suggest that through his own style, Anderson has created a genre of melancholic comedies with a bitter nostalgia; this unique style is part of what makes him an auteur.
- It is not just his style or meanings however that makes Wes Anderson an auteur. You can see from watching With The Filmmaker[20] that he looks at his film crew like a family. He is very hands on with helping everyone out, he works with the writers, editors, cameramen and set designers, he even has his brother do the illustrations for his films. You could say he holds the film making unit together, like a family. I feel this also leaves him principle creator of his films.Looking at Andrew Sarris’s theory of auteurism[25], Anderson makes it through the first circle for his technical competence. He’s in the second circle for the way that he expresses himself through his films and the third is for his films ‘interior meaning’, in our case relating to the family unit. Overall, in my opinion, Anderson is an auteur.
- The Royal Tenenbaums [1] is about a family of child geniuses who experienced failure after their father left in their adolescents, and about how they come together after Royal, their father, returns. One of the major events in the film which brings the Tenenbaum family together, literally and physically, is when they find out about Richie’s attempted suicide. The montage starts with a shot of Richie on a bed being wheeled into a hospital. The following shots show his mother and siblings rushing to the hospital after they hear the news. All this was to illustrate the urgency of the situation, unlike the montage when the family found out Royal was dying, it is very fast paced. It shows how quick the family react when they find out one of them is in trouble, other than Royal that is, who wasn’t even in the montage since by this point, they don’t really count him as part of the family. The music mirrored the song that was playing when Richie cut himself only without the lyrics and faster. It adds to the urgency and allows the scene to slide seamlessly together. It demonstrates that though the family unit is breaking they still love each other and are there for each other when they need to be. Moreover that the family unit, though dysfunctional get on just as well without a father figure (Royal) around. This shows Andersons opinions of family units, how they are there for each other in times of need. And also how they get on just as well even though not perfect, like Royal leaving in the film or Anderson’s own parents’ divorce.
- The Darjeeling Limited [2] is a film about three distant brothers traveling India a year after their father’s death trying to reconnect. The film, as well as The Royal Tenenbaums shares many of Anderson’s recurrent themes, such as parental abandonment and a broken family unit. One of the ways he does this is through setting. The brothers spend the majority of the film on a train. It is on a journey and no matter what it will reach a destination, much like the brothers, yet, unlike the train they don’t know yet where. However the train gets lost “Jack ‘How can a train be lost? It’s on rails’” [2]. This shows how out of their depth they are, and how lost they are since their father’s death. It suggests, like the beginning of The Royal Tenenbaums that a broken family cannot be put back together and puts emphasis on the father role, without it the family unit is broken and lost. The changing moment in the film is when Francis takes the bandages off his face. The whole scene is one stationary mid shot with the men in a line, grooming themselves. The background is green, contrasting with the colours in the foreground making the brothers stand out. The lighting is bright so that their skin looks a bit orange and links with the orange and yellow shades in posters behind them, suggesting that they belong there, as a family. The speed is very slow, signifying how slow the journey has been for them to come together. The three men all share imperfections, Francis covered in scars, Peter with shaving cream still on his face and Jack with a bandage on his forehead, like a family, no one is perfect. The moment implies how without their parents, this dysfunctional, broken family came together in the end, much like the ending of The Royal Tenenbaums.
- Fantastic Mr. Fox [3] is a stop motion adaptation of the book byRoald Dahl about a mischievous fox and how his love of stealing from farmers gets him and his family into trouble. He has to keep scheming so he can outwit the farmers and save everyone. This film, though sharing similar themes of parental neglect – Ash feeling that his father favours his cousin Kristofferson – and dysfunction – Mr. Fox’s existential crisis, is the odd one out in Wes Anderson’s portfolio. His portrayal of the family unit is very different in this film. The reason I feel for this is that; unlike The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox is more of a family film. Anderson admits that though the team never particularly thought of their audience as they went along, they knew from the start it was a children’s film [23]. This explains why he didn’t include his usual mix of angst and disappointment but he still couldn’t help but make changes to the book slightly by adding some flaws to the character of Mr. Fox. Anderson states that “in the book he was not ideal because he was the one who got them in trouble in the first place” and that he needed to be imperfect to justify his actions [23]. Leaving us with another dysfunctional father figure in the Wes Anderson family unit.
- Despite his dark themes and messages, Anderson always ends his films with the coming together of his families in some bizarre situation. Take for example the wedding scene in The Royal Tenenbaums, the montage at the end of The Darjeeling Limited or the scene in the supermarket in Fantastic Mr. Fox. In my opinion this shows that though Anderson may suggest negative connotations with the family unit, he feels that it will always come together. Not every family has to function exactly according to plan.