With the possible exception of Quentin Tarantino, there is no living filmmaker with a more idiosyncratic and easily identifiable visual style than Wes Anderson. If you have seen even one of his movies, its characteristics will be familiar: insistent axial compositions, obsessively curated interiors, frames densely packed with information, pastel hues, far-flung places, a distinct sense of preciousness and ample use of the typeface Futura.
That aesthetic, it should be noted, got its first public airing in Anderson’s debut feature, Bottle Rocket, which featured locations around Dallas, including a chase sequence in Deep Ellum and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Gillin House.
Anderson’s unique vision and taste for the exotic (at least to Western eyes) has inspired many an acolyte, none more devoted than the Delaware-based couple Wally and Amanda Koval, who in 2017 founded the Instagram account Accidentally Wes Anderson, where a consortium of followers post images in the master’s idiom. It has since grown into its own cottage industry, including a 2020 bestseller and now its follow-up, Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures (Little, Brown/Voracious, $45), a hybrid photography book and travel guide to sites far and wide that seem, well, Andersonesque.
The book includes some 200 locations in 50 countries, from familiar tourist destinations (Schönbrunn Palace, in Vienna) to the more remote (Mikladalur Church, on the Faroe Islands).
“Some of these look imaginary, and apparently look like I made them up, but I didn’t,” Anderson writes in the book’s foreword.
All, you can be sure, are cute.
