Page 27 - PROTAGONIST 136

Design Museum displays Wes Anderson’s archives for first time:
Wes Anderson: The Archives, 21 November 2025 – 26 July 2026
the Design Museum, London ©Richard Round-Turner
©Roger Do Minh ©the Design Museum

much Anderson loves to counterpose the visionary and sur-
real pain and emotion of his characters with the chromat-
ic and architectural harmony of his scenes. The subtle iro-
ny and marked emotional intelligence is just a cherry on the
cake. With the help of vintage and slightly psychedelic music
– composed by Mark Mothersbaugh at first, then Alexandre
Desplat – he projects the viewer into oddly elegant and mel-
ancholic universes.
An art show will soon allow the spectators to touch such
atmospheres with their own hands. Wes Anderson: The
Archives, from November 21, 2025 to July 26, 2026, will turn
the Design Museum of London into the first-ever international
display of the filmmaker’s personal archive. With an itinerary
encompassing a 30-plus-year career with over 600 original
objects from his movies – from the famous candy-pink model
of the Grand Budapest Hotel, nearly 10 ft long, to the puppets
from Fantastic Mr. Fox − the retrospective will allow Ander-
son fans to enter his world and observe it from close-up. With
its original storyboards, handwritten pads, and iconic items
like the vending machines from Asteroid City and Sam Shak-
usky’s scout kit in Moonrise Kingdom, the show created with
Cinémathèque française of Paris will help us understand how
simply everything in his films, from Max Fischer’s uniform in
Rushmore to the full version of the short Bottle Rocket, is a
work of art.
Everything deserves to be admired with care and atten-
tion, perhaps making our own selves, for a few hours, become
extravagant dwellers of his pastel-heavy world…

Protagonist Portrait 25