Wes Anderson Shares Animated Storyboard Sketches from 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'
Narrated by the filmmaker himself.
Wes Anderson has shared a glimpse of his original storyboard for his 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel. The movie is a classic that’s garnered wide critical acclaim, including an Oscar while proving to be a surprise box office success. It’s now being added to the Criterion Collection, an organization that licenses “important classic and contemporary films,” and Anderson’s animatic conceptualizations have been included in its Blu-ray.
Nowness shared a five-minute clip of the storyboard, but the full video measures at approximately 25 minutes. The storyboard begins with the opening shots of the movie, “in a small town below the alpines” in “Zubrowka,” a fictional European country imagined by Anderson.
Various sketches of the hotel’s façade are shown, followed by scenes of the building’s interiors and the characters that live inside them. Anderson hand-drew all of the animatics in the pre-production stage of the movie in order to get a clearer idea of camera angles and movement before going into shooting — the entire storyboard is narrated by himself as well.
Some of Anderson’s most memorable frames are shown, too, like the perfectly symmetrical shot of the hotel, the scene at the restaurant and the wide shot of the front concierge, offering a stripped-back look at some of the key visual ideas of the stylish film.
Scroll up to watch a clip of Wes Anderson’s self-narrated animated storyboard.
In case you missed it, here’s the first trailer for Anderson’s upcoming film The French Dispatch.
