Wes Anderson: Archive Review – Wesophiles fans will enjoy this deep dive into the detail-obsessed director design

TTerrible things happen in Wes Anderson movies. In his latest work, The Phoenician Blueprint, a man is accidentally split in half in a plane crash. In The Royal Tenenbaums, the patriarchal protagonist feigns a terminal illness in order to return to his estranged and dysfunctional family. At the Grand Budapest Hotel, the “heroic” concierge Monsieur Gustav is essentially a murderer, and the fictional Republic of Zubrowka is in the tightening grip of the fascist regime.

It’s all played for comedic effect (the sparse cut resembles a Tom and Jerry cartoon; Zubrowka is a brand of Polish bison grass vodka), while it’s lavishly sugar-coated in an array of bizarre antiques, outlandish costumes and saturated colours. Anderson fans will be familiar with the exercise, a bit like finding a mosquito in a cupcake, delivered in a series of perfectly composed vignettes.

Following Stanley Kubrick and Tim Burton, the Design Museum now dazzled with film directors on Anderson, with an expanded version of the show conceived in collaboration with the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, where it premiered. The format is now familiar, featuring a collection of archival material curated film by film. Among the 700 items unearthed from a warehouse in Kent are costumes, wigs, drawings, models, fantasy books, fantasy art, a tent, a typewriter and dozens of stop-motion dolls.

The thirty-year cinematic arc begins with Bottle Rocket, an unexpected mid-’90s homage to Scorsese’s Mean Streets, and ends with The Phoenician Scheme, which was released earlier this year to mixed reviews. Abe Rogers created the exhibition design, with rooms decorated in different shades of red, starting with the mailbox and ending with burgundy. The Anderson quirkfest sets off somewhat against this red backdrop.

Wessaurus enthusiasts will no doubt enjoy digging into the spoils, such as the impossibly complex scale model of the Darjeeling Express, or the sumptuous red velvet and mink number worn by Tilda Swinton in the role of the desiccated widow, Madame Céline Villeneuve d’Esgeuf und Taxis, at the Grand Budapest Hotel. There’s also the actual Grand Budapest Hotel, a towering pink confection that resembles a monstrous marzipan wedding cake, along with models of the mutant sea creatures that populate The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, and a collection of furry dolls and stop-motion puppets from Fantastic Mr Fox, lined up like a monster identity display.

Known for his eye-catching clothes, Wes wore a suit made from the same pants as Mr. Fox, voiced by George Clooney, exemplifying Anderson’s A-list appeal. The stellar ensemble cast is another recurring feature. Blink and you might miss Swinton or Tom Hanks. Broader creative collaborators include graphic designer Erica Dorn and Italian costume designer Melina Canonero, whose first major screen credit was in A Clockwork Orange.

Less committed cineastes may find the insistence on the “mystery” of everything a bit overwhelming, like getting trapped in an Oliver Bonas branch crammed with trumpet rings. The obsessive tone is set from the get-go as the show begins with a showcase full of identical, spiral-bound notebooks, filled with elegant and preternaturally precise outlining ideas for each film. Wes is, and always has been, a detail man.

The overriding impression is one of creative precision bordering on obsession. Considerable effort goes into it, whether it’s testing left-handed kids to achieve the correct kind of 1960s handwriting for a five-word note on screen for seconds in Moonrise Kingdom, or using the exact type of ink favored by the Japanese yakuza to get a tattoo on the back of Mayor Kobayashi, a puppet character from Isle of Dogs.

The arduous technique of stop-motion animation, which requires manipulating models between 12 and 24 times for every second of film, should take the biscuits. Fantastic Mr. Fox took two years to make, and animators, who are like performers, are asked to make the puppet model act and feel like a real person.

Less comfortable and less discussed is what American critic Jonah Weiner described as “the clumsy and awkward way in which Anderson organizes the interactions between the white protagonists—usually upper-class elites—and their non-white foils, usually the working class and the poor.” This was particularly evident in The Darjeeling Limited, which featured three white men wandering through “exotic” India, a reminder of the absence of real-world politics in Anderson’s films. Focusing on the minute details of their arts and crafts easily misrepresents any complex issues.

Yet for all the exciting things on display in the exhibition, there is something fundamentally unsettling about deconstructing the film’s kinetic medium in order to reframe it as a collection of static objects. It’s like pulling back the curtain to find the scene creaking and the mystery, if not completely dissolved, then certainly changed. There is always a kind of reductive lifelessness in everything.

However, Anderson’s unique and rigid worldview continues to attract a large following. It has even produced an extensive fan website, Wes Anderson by Chance, to which fans can submit Andersonian paintings of strange buildings and landscapes. Scrolling past colour-coded alpine chalets, gorgeous laundries, and a quirky crochet museum, it seems there is truly no escape from Wes’s world.