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Recently, I got involved in some mild drama on Twitter (a phrase that always destroys your dignity to utter in public) revolving around the subject of AI art.
I'm sure many of you have seen the latest gimmick AI "artists" have been pushing into the digital spotlight: Wes Anderson parodies. AI presents Wes Anderson's Lord of The Rings. AI presents Wes Anderson's Star Wars. Wes Anderson's The Matrix. Wes Anderson's Avatar. And much more. These 1-2 minute parody trailers imagine what it would look like if Wes Anderson had directed some of the most famous blockbusters ever made. The answer? According to AI, it would look like characters standing in center frame and staring at the camera, pastel colors, shots of objects from straight overhead, and titles like The Whimsical Fellowship, The Galactic Menagerie, The Grand Simulation, or The Peculiar Pandora Expedition. The trailers also usually feature ghoulishly uncanny digital facsimiles of "Timothée Chalamet as Luke Skywalker," "Bill Murray as Gandalf," and "Scarlett Johansson as Princess Leia."
On the surface, these AI parodies are mostly harmless, and for the people largely uninvolved in the discussion about AI, I understand why they've generated a chuckle. Obviously, characters standing in center frame is hardly out of left field for Wes Anderson! For me, though, these videos are patronizing, mind-numbing, and irritating beyond belief - and for the longest time, I couldn't even quite put my finger on exactly why.
There are plenty of sensible reasons to be irritated by AI art. Take the fact that none of it is remotely original, since the algorithm just recycles and melds together images from all over the internet to make something that seems "new" but is, in reality, completely stolen. Or think about how film and TV studios are increasingly using ChatGPT as leverage to convince writers that they could be easily replaced and should be satisfied being underpaid. Or perhaps the simplest reason of all: most of it just looks nightmarish and soulless.
None of those reasons are wholly why I've been irritated by these Wes Anderson parodies, though. Just a few days ago, I figured out the thing that has been bugging me since the start: Flanderization.
If you're not extremely online, you might not know what Flanderization means. Here's how the website TV Tropes (which originally coined the term) describes it:
"Flanderization is the act of taking a single (often minor) action or trait of a character within a work and exaggerating it more and more over time until it completely consumes the character. Most always, the trait/action becomes completely outlandish and it becomes their defining characteristic, turning them into a caricature of their former selves."
Flanderization was named for the character of Ned Flanders in The Simpsons, who (over the course of many seasons) went from a mostly well-intentioned neighbor who happened to be religious to a one-note parody of Bible-thumping fundamentalists with very few layers of depth or redeeming traits.
Personally, I can think of a few other examples of Flanderization in recent movies/TV other than The Simpsons. Jack Sparrow was gradually "Flanderized" throughout the Pirates of The Caribbean series, going from a swashbuckling and sometimes-clumsy pirate to a complete doofus by the fifth entry, as the creatives continued to emphasize the things the audience liked about him to the point of absurdity. Though I don't mind it quite as much, Drax The Destroyer went from a hardened warrior who didn't understand metaphors in Guardians of The Galaxy to a socially inept manchild lacking basic comprehension skills in Guardians Vol. 2. And many would agree that the character of Thor was "Flanderized" in his appearance in Thor: Love & Thunder, which played up his general buffoonery and relationship with his hammer to an almost SNL-sketch-level degree.
Speaking of SNL sketches: the genesis of all of these Wes Anderson AI parodies actually starts with SNL. Back in 2013, when Edward Norton was hosting the show, they premiered a short parody trailer for a fictional horror movie called "The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders." The title actually came from Wes himself; Norton texted him while shooting the sketch and asked what he would title a parody horror film in his own style.
The SNL sketch follows the same pattern of the current AI parodies: centered framing, pastel colors, shots of objects from above. Comparing the two, it's fairly obvious that the AI artists behind the recent trailers used this comedy sketch as their blueprint, both in structure and in punchlines. The difference is, there's some actual craft on display here. The camera moves. There are varying lens choices. There's some fun production and costume design. There's even a bit of actual stop-motion animation! And far from the hollow digital recreations of famous actors, this sketch has SNL's cast impersonating them. It's fun and playful and harmless.
All parody is, by definition, reductionist - and therefore, I suppose you could make the argument that all parody is "Flanderization" in some sense. The very nature of parody is to take an iconic piece of media and exaggerate its most defining features.
In AI's case, though, this exaggerated imitation of defining features exists because that's the only thing that the algorithm is capable of doing. Parody imitates to make jokes, to find meaning, to observe and highlight patterns, to exaggerate for comedic effect, and sometimes to critique or comment. AI imitates because imitation (and often plagiarism) is the only thing that the computer knows how to do - and it's not smart enough to go beyond the surface level.
Wes Anderson works as a subject because he's one of the few directors with a visual style distinct and memorable enough to be fed into an algorithm and shallowly reproduced. That's not to say AI can reproduce it without help; users still have to input descriptive keywords like "center framed, pastel colors, wide lens" to hone in on something vaguely reminiscent. You could never do one of these with Martin Scorsese, or even Steven Spielberg. A talented and perceptive human being could make a decent Spielberg parody, in real life with real actors and a camera. An AI could never manage it.
It's the reduction of Anderson's distinctive style to "center framed, pastel colors, wide lens" that bothers me, though; not because it's entirely wrong, but because it feels like what a person (or better yet: a computer) who has never actually seen Wes Anderson thinks Wes Anderson must be like. It's got more in common with that SNL parody sketch than with any one of his particular movies.
In my subjective interactions with the people online who are ardently defending these AI parodies, I've noticed a common theme: most of them aren't particularly fond of Wes Anderson. I've received a lot of replies calling him a myriad of words from "pretentious" to "overrated." One reply said, "these film nerds just can't stand their precious director having the mirror turned back on him." Some have even eluded to the idea that Anderson's style is clearly not all that it's cracked up to be, since a computer can so easily imitate it without a human being involved. One rather smug (and to be honest, completely insufferable) TikTok summed up the general take on Anderson quite bluntly: “If you’re having a bad day, I want you to know that Wes Anderson is having a worse one. Because imagine working your entire career to develop this iconic style of film that makes you a household name…and suddenly everyone on the internet is duplicating that iconic style, completely invalidating your life’s work, because it turns out it just wasn’t that hard!”
All of this is part of a broader trend of anti-intellectualism and vitriol toward anyone who dares to call themselves an artist, especially in spaces like TikTok, where there’s been an ongoing meme about ‘pretentious cinephiles’ supposedly becoming enraged when you tell them you’d rather watch a Marvel movie than “a 2 hour movie about the Serbian government shown through the eyes of a pigeon." Ignoring the fact that that movie sounds like a total banger, have you seen the way Film Twitter is over the moon about the new Barbie trailer?! That's not exactly hyper-niche foreign arthouse.
It might seem a little counterintuitive to argue that an acclaimed filmmaker like Wes Anderson needs to be defended, but I will. I think that just like the advent of CinemaSins permanently distorted the way normal people think about (and nitpick) movies, these AI parodies may end up doing the same thing through Flanderization. There are already tweets and comments popping up saying that various shots from Anderson's newest movie Asteroid City look "AI generated," meaning that AI brainrot is fragmenting and diluting how we perceive style itself. It leads to lots of cynical comments about Anderson's latest projects, saying things like "how does he keep getting money to make these flops?" and "when will he stop doing the same thing over and over again?" primarily because it devalues the work and reduces it to something that supposedly could have been made by a computer.
Anyone who has actually seen Wes Anderson's filmography, though, knows that he's always upping the ante with each successive film, his style and voice have changed drastically from Bottle Rocket to The French Dispatch, and they're so much more than just static shots of characters in center-frame staring blankly at the camera. In fact, it's Anderson's precise and deliberate movement of the camera that can be so surprising, funny, and even poignant. Go watch Royal Tenenbaums; it's a moving and human story about an imperfect family, not just a gimmick where characters speak in monotone surrounded by pastel.
If you do want a truly creative Wes Anderson parody, look no further than Patrick Willems' wonderful Wes Anderson style trailer for X-Men from back in 2015. It took him nearly 6 months to make, involved all of his friends dressing up in X-Men costumes and filming all over New York, includes some solid low-budget VFX work, and it somehow manages to capture the spirit of Wes Anderson and the X-Men in one 4-minute short. As a genuinely passionate fan of Anderson, Patrick Willems includes inspired music choices that feel inline with something Anderson would really choose. He incorporates some Royal-Tenenbaums-esque slo-mo handheld shots with real, dynamic movement. He imagines the X-Mansion in the style of Anderson's dollhouse cutaway shots. He casts Magneto as a pretentious scarf-wearing academic who wrote a book called E is For Extinction, and Jean Grey as the edgy and alternative loner saying vaguely unsettling things. And he includes lines of dialogue like "We're a school but we're also a paramilitary mutant strike force. So yeah, we're gonna fight people."
And therein lies the difference between creative parody and AI Flanderization: one is lovingly and meticulously created to playfully capture the essence of a particular artist's work; the other is a completely hollow algorithmic imitation of an imitation, capable of embodying the most surface-level traits but never capable of saying anything or understanding the essence of why those traits exist.
Wes Anderson parodies are a pretty old trend, but they used to involve actually getting together with your friends to turn on a camera, dress up in costumes, maybe do a little storyboarding, and make something funny. Now they're just something you type into your computer, sometimes without even knowing who Wes Anderson is in the first place. And I think the world will be worse-off for it.
It seems pretty shortsighted of these people to claim that an AI can copy Wes Anderson's style and therefore it could replace him. The whole point is Wes Anderson CREATED his style; he made creative decisions for various reasons, weighing up alternative ways to express his own ideas and choosing the precise combination of techniques that, combined, form what we associate with him as his style. An AI can copy it but it can't create its own style. If it "wasn't that hard" as the TikTokers say, why didn't someone else do it first?