“Asteroid City”, Wes Anderson in the desert

Asteroid City by Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson, 54, born in Texas, living in Paris, steeped in French culture, with his eternal adolescent face, lives in a unique universe: obsessed with symmetry in the image, pastel colors, details galore, and characters that seem stuck in childhood.

In the Asteroid Cityit is in the desert of the American West, in 1955, that the protagonists are arrested: Asteroid City is a small tourist site, famous for the asteroid that crashed there from space, and which every year hosts a competition for budding scientists, who come to present their inventions of gifted kids. But that year, aliens landed and stole the asteroid. The army intervenes, general confinement, which evokes the Covid pandemic.

Elementary Pixar Studios

It’s the first Pixar to hit theaters since the pandemic, since the previous ones – in chronological order Drunk, Luke And Red alert – had directly spun on the Disney + platform, and after having had a difficult start in the United States, Elementary so come to us. This is the story of a city where communities live together, grouped by element: fire, water, earth and air. Except that these groups do not mix, and the people of the flames in particular, who are at the heart of the film and its plot, are poorer, and relegated to the suburbs.

But you can guess what will happen, Flam, an intrepid young woman, and Flack, a more sensitive boy, will meet and have to team up. The pretext for many visual finds, rather spectacular and successful, but also for the director Peter Sohn to draw on his personal history to evoke living together.