Wes Anderson

Raised in Houston and educated at the University of Texas at Austin, Wes Anderson (b. 1969) is an incredibly eclectic filmmaker whose work demonstrates a range of US and international influences, including global art cinema, 1960s British rock music, the films of the Hollywood Renaissance, television animation, even children’s literature. In 1992 he made his first movie, a short film entitled Bottle Rocket. He expanded it four years later into a film of the same name with his college classmate and frequent collaborator Owen Wilson. His sophomore effort, Rushmore, was co-produced by Anderson’s own American Empirical Pictures and Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, and it established Anderson as a leading “Indiewood” filmmaker. His distinctive style—meticulously controlled mise-en-scène, deadpan humor, flat affect, distinctive color palettes—has made his work almost instantly recognizable and widely imitated. So, too, have his themes: traumatic loss and the resulting grief, the tenuous distinction between childhood and adulthood, illicit desire and failed romances, fractured families and the alternative configurations that emerge in their wake. Wes Anderson stands as one of the most influential writer-directors working today, and his oeuvre has already inspired a robust—and growing—body of film scholarship and criticism. The bibliography presents seven interrelated bodies of work on Anderson’s scholarship to map out the major interventions thus far.