Wes World

Film director Wes Anderson is a pedant. For 30 years, he has been creating highly stylized films, packed with tons of details, both large and small: from the books written and read by the heroes of "The Royal Tenenbaums" (2001), for which Anderson worked on the cover of each one himself (including font design), through the expensive 17th-century oil painting "Boy with Apple," which he invented for "The Grand Budapest Hotel" (2014), to the vending machines in "Asteroid City" (2023), which sell coffee and ice cream alongside ammunition.

A comprehensive exhibition at the Design Museum in London, stunning in its richness and beauty, now presents items from the archive that Anderson has compiled over 12 films, and allows one to wander inside the mind of a creator, which is all colors, shapes, textures, texts, and textiles. Visiting it is akin to freezing frames from his films and investigating them with a magnifying glass. Small details that pass quickly on the screen become large and central exhibits, revealing how much work was invested in every pixel. What looks like a momentary whim is the product of many months of work by entire teams. But more than anything, this exhibition manages to reflect Anderson's development as a creator: how he invented himself at age 29 in his second film, and since then has gradually moved from macro to micro — as his ambition grew (and with it his budgets), his films became more complex, richer, and more sophisticated.