San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Reality imitates film with ‘AccidentallyWes Anderson’
On one hand, the Pancakes Stand in Krka National Park in Croatia lacks some qualities of a space that might be featured in a Wes Anderson film.
The lettering on the front, “PANCAKES,” bears a wobbly crudeness. Also, the roof of the little structure is askew. The Pancakes Stand doesn’t appear, well, perfectly composed.
On the other hand, one can savor its oddness: a beloved, homemade station for a purveyor of pancakes sitting alone on the outskirts of a lush green forest. Those are Anderson-esque elements.
Houston native Anderson has been making films for 25 years. He’s told many different types of stories in different ways, but there exists a cohesion to his vision as a filmmaker. As writer and traveler Wally Koval puts it: “the pastel hues … the symmetrical lines … there are some things we’ve come to associate with his movies.”
Three years ago, Koval, assisted by his wife, Amanda, started an Instagram account he called Accidentally Wes Anderson (AWA for short), where other travelers could submit their photos of places around the world that looked like they might appear in one of Anderson’s stylish and stylized films. This week the Instagram account transforms into something different: “Accidentally Wes Anderson,” a lushly illustrated book full of those photos with little histories of these far-flung places.
“Accidentally Wes Anderson” is both a loving counterpart to the filmmaker’s work and an admirable piece of work on its own. The Kovals selected scores of sites and arranged them geographically.
Texas is represented twice in the book, including a fireworks stand in Bastrop and the pale-pink Central Fire Station in Marfa. The Houston First Corp. had plans to bring Koval to Anderson’s hometown — where he shot his 1998 film “Rushmore” — to see some sites, but those plans were scuttled by the coronavirus. He’s hoping to reschedule the visit for next year.
Some of the photos are reminiscent of the exterior and the interior of the once resplendent hotel in which Anderson imagined being stationed in the fictional European nation of Zubrowka in his 2014 film “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Other photographs convey a little of the isolation and melancholy that runs through Anderson’s work: a lone yellow viewfinder looking over the water in Monopoli, Italy; a
solitary yellow telephone stationed at Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska.
“I like how something can be AWA to one person and not another,” Koval says. “It can depend on perspective or having the light just right or one’s particular state of mind. Sometimes a moment just hits you.”
Koval says they get about 1,000 submissions each month. “Each and every one is a moment in time where somebody was uplifted or inspired by a space or a location or a person,” he says. “Or the light or wind hitting at the right time.”
Some of the photographs are of places so illogically composed they seem made up. When I tell Koval that the Hotel Belvedere — nestled within a switchback itself nestled within Furka Pass in Switzerland — looks like a model, he admits loving the photograph so much that he had a model of the hotel made. It greets readers on the cover of the book.
To Koval’s credit, he could simply have taken the greatest hits from the Instagram account and slapped them inside a lavishly illustrated book and collected a book advance. But he enjoys the informational acquisition of travel too much to have done so. Rather, each space in “Accidentally Wes Anderson” includes a little blurb with its provenance.
“To me, the history, the background story, those things are just as important as the pastels, the symmetry, the things that got these places picked. We tried our best to provide some substance and context, too.”
Sometimes the stories have a particularly human aspect, like a post office in Wrangell, Alaska, which might be the most accidental of AWA states. “It’s a community of people who’d rather walk up and pick up their mail rather than having it delivered by a postman or postwoman,” Koval says. “It’s such a small detail, but the kind of thing that brings a smile to my face. And I also find myself wondering: How far would I be willing to walk in the winter just to get my mail?”
The book also strikes a tone of geographical connectivity. Anderson’s films aren’t typically set in any one known place. The opacity of his settings is mirrored by the blur of architectural and artistic styles on the pages. Koval says the global vibe is also represented in those who visit and contribute to AWA, “a global community of overwhelming positivity,” he says, with about 30 percent in the United States, about 30 percent in the United Kingdom and the other 40 percent scattered around the world.
“Through all the craziness of this year, not being able to travel, you can share the backyards for some of these communities,” he says. “Our hope was to offer a very small silver lining during tough times.”
As a travel book, “Accidentally
Wes Anderson” is too far reaching to offer a proper itinerary for a single trip. Rather, it’s a reminder upon visiting a place, any place, that some charms aren’t codified by travel guides.
“For us, it’s about walking around and allowing a city to accept us and serving what it has to us,” Koval says.
As for Anderson, the filmmaker clearly approved of the project, as he wrote the forward to
“Accidentally Wes Anderson.”
“There must be about 200 locations here, which should keep me busy for several decades, but I plan to not let any of these experiences escape me,” he wrote, “especially the Croatian pancakes stand.”