As an art that impacts people in terms of audio-visual perception, movies usually impress audiences the most with the formality of their images and sound effects. In movie history, those directors who are good at pioneering the most cutting-edge audio-visual language can often occupy a place in the history of cinema. Take for example the Hitchcock Zoom. This new and innovative filming technique has many video bloggers clamoring to imitate it. Recently on TikTok, there’s been a new renaissance of movie parody. This time, it’s the work of visually obsessive director Wes Anderson. Wes Anderson, an American director and producer, is known for his symmetry, unique vintage color palette, and eccentric features.
You can’t get enough of this kind of footage, so the #WesAnderson hashtag quickly became a high-traffic cipher on TikTok with its quirky hashtags and unique parody style. In this era of short videos, it may be a bit too difficult for ordinary users or video creators to tell a compelling and good story with novel shots. But with Wes Anderson’s camera language, it is possible. The popular video by Avawillyums under the #WesAnderson hashtag on Tiktok mimics things: ticket stubs, shoes, and train windows are transformed into the language of ‘Wes Anderson’ through clever editing.
The author of this video, Ms. Williams, said she took the train at 6:45 a.m. on her way to New York to visit her family. However, the video was edited because she was not able to visit her family as she had hoped. “I didn’t want to end on a bad note,” Ms. Williams said of her trip. Instead, as a fan of Mr. Anderson’s films, she decided to make herself feel better by pretending to be in a Wes Anderson movie.
Why not add some artistic beauty to your life by imitating something created by the master? Besides, Wes Anderson’s style does have the ability to uncover the highlights of ordinary life. With her video, she blew a bunch of Wes Anderson fans out of the water. Of course, the movie master’s camera tricks usually serve the narrative, using more cutting-edge audio-visual language to help the audience better bring in the plot and atmosphere of the story. And by imitating Wes Anderson’s movie footage, it can tap into the unique aspects of some otherwise meaningless things in life, which is also a functional role of the #WesAnderson parody hashtag. Applying Wes Anderson’s template turns his mundane life moments into a sense of cinema. Like many of Mr. Anderson’s films, these TikTok videos almost always begin with a title sequence. Usually presented in three to four quick clips, they identify where the subjects are, what they’re doing, and what time it is.
“The First Train.”
“Along the East Coast Line”
“¤ To Grand Central Terminal ¤
“6:45.”
The image then takes the most boring and trivial shots of the day and edits them together. It could be a casual close-up of tying your shoes, hitching a ride on the subway, or a very everyday meal with your partner. If it involves images of people, an expressionless face is the best way to express it. Couple this with a dynamic instrumental soundtrack and quick camera edits. Even an ordinary shot of buying a commuter coffee can be transformed into the kind of cinematic feel of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Darjeeling Limited.
In making these videos, people are finding this beauty in the mundane, says Wally Kovar, author of the photography book, Accidentally Wes Anderson. You, who imitate Wes Anderson, are also seeing your world through a slightly different lens.
The eye-catching Wes Anderson style didn’t happen overnight either; he also figured it out through long moments of confusion.
Wes Anderson was born in 1969 to a middle-class family in Houston, Texas. During his college years, he and fellow student Owen Wilson (director of “Night at the Museum”) hit it off right away, and the two film-loving young men embarked on a real path of their own. But they were not instant successes, and some of their first small-budget films were even judged to be “commercial failures”. After eight years of stumbling around, they finally hit the big time with 2001’s The Talented Ones, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Bold and warm colors, a fairytale-like cinematic sense of peeking into a crowded candy box, cold humor in the plot design, and a fairytale-like warm ending. With this work, you can see that Wes Anderson’s characteristic ‘Wayside Aesthetic’ and style has gradually taken shape. This also gave Wes Anderson a real turnaround in his movie career.
After two more modestly successful films, Wes Anderson finally made a name for himself in mainstream cinema and with mass audiences with The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2014, having honed his “must-have” skills. The Grand Budapest Hotel opened the 64th Berlin Film Festival won the Silver Bear at the Grand Jury Prize, and was nominated for nine Academy Awards at the 87th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. In this movie, he also achieved a style that delights obsessive-compulsive disorder – symmetrical composition paranoia. Anderson, an avid fan of perfectly symmetrical pictures, almost always places the camera on the center axis of the screen. Even the furnishings in the background favored balanced compositions with left-right symmetry, and even the architecture he chose embodied a symmetrical style.
His works since then have also carried his style to the end, one way or another. Isle of Dogs” and “The French Specialists” continue the usual “Weiss” audio-visual language and narrative style, but also add more of his satire on reality and deeper thinking about real society. In his movies, he tells a thought-provoking fairy tale in a cheerful and witty form, but with a touch of sad comedy. Whether or not you can really read a movie is a very esoteric thing. Sometimes you think you’re reading the director’s terrain, but you’re actually over-interpreting it. But watching a Wes Anderson movie is like reading a fairy tale book with beautiful images and a heartwarming story. Even if you don’t read it, you’ll be captivated by the neat compositions and warm story inside.
Folding a three-dimensional movie into a two-dimensional fairy tale book is perhaps what touches people’s hearts the most in Wes Anderson’s works. It’s the “Wes’s aesthetic” that has allowed it to influence pop culture in a more sustained and circle-breaking way.
When a reporter told Wes Anderson himself about the #WesAnderson hashtag parody video with 1.4 billion views on TikTok, Wes Anderson said, “You can talk about it, but I don’t watch it. Wes Anderson will actively avoid watching these parody videos not because he hates such behavior.
On the contrary, he very much understands the act of fans parodying their favorite movies as a way of showing love and admiration. But he himself is a highly sensitive person. Watching parody videos, he was afraid of the subconscious effect it would have on his own creativity and expression. In order to protect his ability to think without influence and to be responsible for his future work, he chose to protect himself.
As a result, Wes Anderson is able to create work that is more masterful rather than staying in place. It’s one of the reasons fans love him.
This year Wes Anderson gave us a new movie, Asteroid City, in a more heavily Wesian style. With more symmetrical compositions, more playful set shots, and a plot that is consistently absurd and rich in cold humor …… The film was also just nominated for the Palme d’Or, which is Wes Anderson’s new shot at the little gold man once again. Wes Anderson’s thoughts on the movie and the camera also stem from life. Life is made up of many meaningless moments stitched together to become a story guide. And when we use such an imitation lens to record our daily life, aren’t we also recording our own life orientation at the moment? Wes Anderson: If you can’t read the story, then you can also come to look at my composition and use my technique to make a Vlog to send it to your friends. Isn’t such a warm summary also very much Wes Anderson’s warm fairy tale narrative?