Most people probably don’t remember this, but from 1992-2002, the MTV Movie Awards gave out an honor for Best New Filmmaker. For a show whose awards ranged from Best Kiss to Best Fight, this particular category remains surprisingly sophisticated and has aged incredibly well. The initial trophy went to the late, great John Singleton for his instant classic Boyz N The Hood and subsequent years included names that would become box office juggernauts (Christopher Nolan for Memento, Guy Ritchie for Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, Doug Liman for Swingers) and some of the great artists of their generation (Spike Jonze for Being John Malkovich, Sophia Coppola for The Virgin Suicides, Steve James for Hoop Dreams). Even the ones that feel a bit less prescient are still pretty dang cool in hindsight, like Carl Franklin winning for One False Move and Steven Zaillian for Searching For Bobby Fischer.
This was how I first discovered Wes Anderson in 1996, as a teen tuning in to see Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo host, Seven win best movie, and Adam Sandler perform a song about Mel Gibson (back when that didn’t have any baggage). Seeing Wes Anderson accept this award for a scrappy little Texan crime caper called Bottle Rocket, my Pulp Fiction-obsessed friends and I went to the video store, checked out a VHS copy, and were won over by the hilarious writing, playful needle drops, and inventive storytelling. It reflected the post-Tarantino cinema world in a way, but substituted any hard edge with lovable characters and heart. Needless to say, this was the last Wes Anderson movie I didn’t see in a movie theater.
Flash forward 30 years, and Wes Anderson is still making inventive, often hilarious original films with a ton of heart. It would be hard to say that Bottle Rocket foretold exactly where he’d head in his career, but many of the bones were there from the beginning. He’s become a signifier for a style all his own, so much so that whole books are written about his aesthetic. And, for the first time ever, his first ten films have been restored in 4K for a new Criterion box set that plays with the Wes Anderson style.
The box set is surely on the top of holiday wishlists for any reasonable cinephile, and the movies contained within are about 80% of the reason. But first, let’s talk about that other 20%. The experience begins with the outer burlap casing, that first look at his trademark Futura font, and the experience of opening the collection to reveal a library aesthetic. For anyone who has ever been criticized for having a collection of plastic in their home, this set instantly dispels that notion, as each individual movie can be displayed as a book on a shelf.
Digging a little deeper, and the content of each film’s casing lives up to the aesthetic. There are essays from legends like Martin Scorsese, Richard Brody, and Bilge Ebiri, behind-the-scenes images and storyboards, and 25 hours of supplemental features on each disc. There’s even notes from Wes himself, whose inrto to the set comes in typical self-deprecating fashion, referring to the movies as “varying in quality.”
And then you have the films themselves. You gets both 4K and Blu-Ray discs of each, covering the shaggy debut Bottle Rocket all the way to the underseen, Covid-era release The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. Of course, since Anderson is so prolific, he’s already released a pair of movies that are not included here, Asteroid City and The Phoenician Scheme, as well as a series of short films for Netflix that earned him an Academy Award. Hopefully, Criterion will be giving them their own releases soon.
But watching the movies of Anderson’s past, what strikes me most is how his vision progresses and changes over time. Many take the position that he has a thing and at some point exhausted his ideas. Talk to ten different people and they’ll give you different answers to when Wes Anderson fell off, and cite him as someone they’ve grown out of to some extent. But I simply don’t see it this way. Sure, I have lesser favorites — Moonrise Kingdom has always been the one that didn’t quite work for me — but strolling through Anderson’s career finds an artist always evolving and growing.
The initial three films — Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums — most trace an initial growth and find the director honing his voice. And I think this progression was so evident and clear that people largely disengaged from how his later films made more subtle evolutions of style. Thus, we had people react divisively to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which is now baffling upon rewatch, where his recurring theme of difficult relationships between fathers and their children is never more underscored. Other movies with vocal detractors — The Darjeeling Limited, Isle Of Dogs, and The French Dispatch — all have aged wonderfully and look great in the set, while The Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Grand Budapest Hotel easily earn their standing as later masterpieces.
While Anderson’s films are unmistakably his own, tied together by symmetry, detailed art design, moments of straightforward sincerity, and jokes that don’t wait for the audience to catch up, it’s also very easy to note what makes each film special. This goes beyond subject matter or genre — a camp movie, a spiritual quest, a revenge picture — and more speaks to how Anderson learns from his previous work and applies it going forward. Recently, when watching The Phoenician Scheme, I was taken by how Anderson’s punchlines were given more air to breathe, how there was more room for laughter. It’s the kind of evolution that would probably go unnoticed in passing, but highlights how Wes’ films can give back how much the audience puts into them. It’s for that reason that this Criterion set is such a gift to fans, and is in turn an ideal gift to give to a fan. They’re carefully made, deeply felt, and richly entertaining. And now they’ll look great in your home, too.