Wes Anderson’s directorial style is unmistakably identifiable across his live-action films, all of which have been lensed by cinematographer Robert Yeoman. Anderson assembles aesthetic color palettes, symmetrical framing, meticulous design elements, and wide-angle camera shots to produce a nostalgic world where gloom lingers around the edges of ethereal fantasy. Given the filmmaker’s singular voice, it comes as no surprise that many modern directors replicate “Andersonian” thematic and aesthetic styles in their filmmaking.
The Mysterious Benedict Society, Disney+’s recent adaptation of Trenton Lee Stewart’s fantasy book series, features seven directors across its eight-episode first season. This revelation may come as a shock to viewers who’ve noticed the consistent and cohesive nature of the series’ imagery, tone, and atmosphere. Directing styles can vary widely, yet this show feels cohesive. One also can’t help but notice how both the directing and cinematography in every episode bear striking similarities to Anderson’s work.
Benedict’s mise-en-scene distills a sense of fantastical surrealism that especially recalls Anderson’s films, which occasionally take place in an artificial reality, either with no set time period or as an amalgam of different 20th-century decades. In blending fantasy and reality through such hyper-realistic imagery and scenarios, both pieces of media communicate a shared, underlying subtext. Idealized youth, nostalgia, and a loss of innocence arise as major themes in Anderson’s films; in collaboration with Yeoman’s cinematography, the filmmaker embraces surrealist whimsy to offset the dark undertones driving his narratives. Whimsical imagery similarly factors into how The Mysterious Benedict Society balances the grief underscored in the lives of its characters.
Essentially, Benedict’s Andersonian influence elevates it beyond reductive critical assessments of the show as “child-oriented” television. Fantastical surrealism, symmetry, “quirk” and dry wit provoke philosophical discussions — discussions where characters find meaning beyond what is visible — in the series, much as they do in Anderson’s films. Examining the Andersonian inspiration on a show whose cinematic constructs are so charged with whimsicality can help audiences gain a greater appreciation and understanding of the thematic potency such visually evocative filmmaking can harness.
In The Mysterious Benedict Society, the characters inhabit a world that appears constructed, an artifice of reality. Vibrant green and blue shades make buildings stand out, appearing unique yet comforting. Everyone wears brightly colored, loose-fitted clothes devoid of stains or wrinkles. Reminiscent of the ironically jovial hues found across Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), soothing pink tones are flaunted frequently in Benedict, camouflaging the series’ darker thematic undertones. When the four children protagonists, Reynie (Mystic Inscho), Sticky (Seth Carr), Kate (Emmy DeOliveira), and Constance (Marta Kessler), infiltrate an elite school as spies, the institute’s minimalist interior designs create a futuristic atmosphere, and Benedict’s pastel color palette further heightens this fantasy ambiance. Even detached from the story, the alluring images presented to the audience seem filtered through a child’s auspicious and imaginative point of view.
Often, Wes Anderson incites philosophical discussions by juxtaposing adult hardships with childhood reverie. His films center around adult characters stifled by nostalgia for an ideal past or stunted in immaturity after trauma in their youth. Children in Anderson’s films exhibit a charming innocence and precociousness to offset the tragedy his adult characters experience in their daily lives. Furthermore, whimsical Andersonian children remind adults to cherish the present moment, for that is all they have. This same dynamic unfolds in The Mysterious Benedict Society between its children and the adults.
Youths like Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) from Moonrise Kingdom (2012), Max (Jason Schwartzman) from Rushmore (1998), or Kristofferson (voiced by Eric Chase Anderson) from Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) view life with enthusiasm and sincerity. In The Mysterious Benedict Society, Reynie, Sticky, Kate, and Constance are all prodigies. They are gifted like Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), Chas (Ben Stiller), and Richie (Luke Wilson) in Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), existing in a higher intelligence level even beyond other talented children. But as adults, the Tenenbaum children are emotionally immature, a ramification of the intense expectations placed upon them in childhood.
Anderson exemplifies how childhood loss of innocence affects characters, particularly in films such as Moonrise Kingdom. Heavily focused on the whimsical beliefs children inhabit, Moonrise Kingdom shows the contrast between Suzy and Sam’s fantastical romance schemes and the infidelity, complacency, or depression indulged by adults around them. Anderson juxtaposes innocent, adolescent ideals versus the stark reality of grown-ups who have forgotten childhood paragons of happiness.
Anderson’s films and Benedict episodes utilize planimetric compositions, compass point editing, and the whip pan camera shot to whimsically convey the relationships between the astute children and their hardened adult counterparts.
Planimetric compositions orient characters specifically within a perpendicular angle from the camera. Profiling the characters in this way highlights their expressions and gives the background planes a flattened appearance. Anderson commonly employs this technique to showcase particular characters within a scene, producing symmetry and again achieving surrealist hyperrealism.
The Mysterious Benedict Society blends compass point editing (instead of more conventional shot-reverse-shot film techniques) with close-up profile views on the children to mimic planimetric compositions. Usually, two or more characters face the camera in these scenes without looking directly into the camera to accomplish this fantastical symmetry. When the Benedict children talk amongst themselves, we see these planimetric compositions come into effect. Mr. Benedict (Tony Hale) often appears centered between his loyal assistants, Number Two (Kristen Schaal) and Rhonda (MaameYaa Boafo), when he addresses the children in the first two episodes. The three occupy the foreground together in scenes. Their arrangement subtly indicates how the two women serve necessary leadership roles, chiefly for the children, alongside Mr. Benedict.
Symmetry in filmmaking gives these scenes a dreamlike, cosmic quality. Viewers are made aware of the artifice, yet the surrealist way in which symmetry and planimetric compositions frame the characters allow audiences to perceive the importance of these designated characters on screen. The visual potency of these directing and cinematic styles was evident in Anderson’s films from the beginning, in the 1992 short film version of Bottle Rocket (1996). There, and in the feature expansion, the child-like behaviors and mental instability of brothers Dingan (Owen Wilson) and Anthony (Luke Wilson) are foreshadowed by symmetry and planimetric compositions.
In the case of The Mysterious Benedict Society, the children’s meticulous placement within the frames is no fussier than that of the adults on screen; the positions of adults and children are given equal weight. Especially relevant in regards to this equilibrium are scenes in which a Benedict child faces the camera symmetrically in the foreground, as an adult figure stands offset exactly to the right or left behind them. The exuberant child in the foreground and the forlorn look of Milligan (Ryan Hurst), Mr. Benedict, or Mr. Curtain in the background informs viewers about the adult’s apparent nostalgia or mourning their loss of innocence.
Whip pans and compass point editing, wherein the camera moves left to right on a dolly, help maintain the fantasy surrealist atmosphere that these planimetric compositions produce. Within these close-frame, symmetrical shots, facial expressions are crucial to preserving a delicate balance between reality and artifice.
Whether it’s Reynie questioning Mr. Benedict’s evil twin about his odd salad preparation during a serious discussion in Benedict or a young fan of Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) offering him a toy seahorse in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), facial demeanors express how philosophical musings can occur within children’s fantastical realms of possibilities. However, when the camera whips to the adults in a scene, they portray markedly different reactions to the same scenarios. The camera blurs between horizontal dolly shots, the whip pan disorientation mirroring the disoriented expression on the characters’ faces. In this way, The Mysterious Benedict Society visually dissects adult and adolescent interactions by emulating Anderson’s trademark camera shot techniques.
In Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, the book that inspired Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animated film of the same name, Dahl writes: “We’re all different but there’s something kind of fantastic about that, isn’t there?” This conceit encapsulates the “quirk” apparent in Anderson’s films and The Mysterious Benedict Society. The Atlantic writer Michael Hirschorn defines the aesthetic principle of quirk as “an embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream.” Most noticeably, quirk is found simply in Anderson’s choice to mimic older filmic stop-motion techniques in Fantastic Mr. Fox; for example, he chooses not to eliminate fingerprint impressions on the puppets and allows audiences to see dynamic fur movement. The artificiality supplies extra charm and innocence to the animal characters.
Akin to Anderson’s films, Benedict unabashedly embraces quirk; its unique character portrayals transcend archetypes. Andersonian shot techniques allow the Benedict children — and the adults’ — to flourish in all their eccentricities. Countless experimental camera shots in Benedict depict, say, Kate’s implementations of the unusual materials inside her bucket to solve predicaments. By positively representing Kate’s devotion to nonconformity through her odd behaviors, one can find a parallel in how Rushmore celebrates Max Fischer’s quirkiness.
Kate’s wholehearted belief in her bucket’s power to rescue her in any situation in Benedict embellishes her character’s oddball characteristics. Both Kate and Rushmore’s Max may demonstrate unorthodox traits, but the films around them eventually lend credence and emotional depth to their peculiarities. When Kate loses her bucket, the audience experiences the loss along with Kate, as a slow-motion, God’s-eye view shot shows the bucket tumbling down a cliff. In Rushmore, the soundtrack and camera angle when Rosemary (Olivia Williams) leans over Max in bed after his supposed car accident makes the scene feel romantic — until she catches him in yet another lie. These moments are enhanced through cinematography that emphasizes unconventional characters and visually lingers in a parallel to the loss of innocence on narrative display.
Offbeat characters in Benedict and Anderson’s films display a certain charisma that captivates the audience, before turning points later cause the audience to re-examine how the characters’ flaws and foibles impacted their actions, even as the characters reassess themselves. Deliberate directing choices slowly break apart that whimsical façade as these scenes unfold. Through experimental, “quirky” cinematography — the kind not frequently exercised in children’s media like Benedict — the audience is led to feel acutely an emotional resonance paralleling the characters’ on-screen journeys toward self-actualization.
Within the whimsy of Anderson’s films, viewers will (likely) find themselves laughing at the movies’ dry wit, achieved through actors’ comedic timing and deadpan deliveries. Andersonian characters tend to deliver dialogue in a monotone style, this vocal timbre reflecting stunted temperaments that complicate the unspoken emotional yearning behind their words. The French Dispatch (2021) takes this even further by exhibiting dry wit as a cinematic construct in of itself. A veteran journalist begins sleeping with the college-aged revolt leader she is reporting on. In bed, they discuss their relationship and politics with the same monotone speech patterns. The humor emerges from both the syntax and the scene’s precise framing. Lucinda (Frances McDormand) types on a typewriter and Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) writes his manifesto on a notepad while the pair mundanely converse about various topics of interest. Their whimsical relationship is built upon idealized youth, striving for both a revolution and a relationship that are beyond their means and abilities.
Dry wit works much like Andersonian comedy in The Mysterious Benedict Society. Consider how none of the characters in Benedict treat Mr. Benedict’s narcolepsy humorously. When Mr. Benedict feels overwhelmed, he simply plunges forward into his meal or falls off his seat. The camera sits completely still at a medium distance when such incidents occur, Rhonda and Number Two rushing to make him comfortable until he awakens. These shots’ stillness, the rapid-fire dialogue enacted, and the characters’ understated actions during these scenes exude the same lighthearted, drily melancolic whimsy as Anderson’s films.
While The Mysterious Benedict Society maintains its originality as a narrative series and does not exactly recreate Wes Anderson’s mise-en-scène, nor mimic his visual aesthetics wholesale, resemblances between the two pieces of media are undeniable. Anderson and Benedict explore adulthood trauma through exploring childhood whimsicality, using an array of compositional cinematic techniques as a visual foil. These comparisons are particularly fascinating to consider how Anderson’s films are often rated R and largely geared toward older audiences, whereas Benedict targets a younger viewership. Nevertheless, Anderson’s fans will enjoy finding parallels in the visual cinematography elements and nostalgic themes of Benedict, and, in examining how their cinematic constructs function, will come away impressed by a shared thematic and aesthetic tendency to push the boundaries of what “evocative” filmmaking can achieve.
