Well, I liked Anderson before he started making movies about talking foxes, but I can see your point about contrived nature of his directing, and also agree that animation was kind of an obvious step for him. If you're going to go with an "artificial" look, you might do well in a medium that is artificial by its very nature.
It's not so much that he's an acquired taste as you either don't like his movies or you do, and I don't think its not "getting" his movies, either. He's a director you can totally "get" and like even less than if you didn't "get" him than if you did. It's probably why he lost the Ursa Major; Cameron made a movie designed from the ground up to appeal to every single human being on the planet while Anderson made a movie designed to appeal to, well, Anderson, mostly. I mean, if some other people end up liking it, that's gravy and all, but it's his movie.
I also hear he did piss off some of his animators when he left the set for a trip to Paris. I believe the trip was business related and he just didn't take off on a lark, but I don't think he'd done such things on his previous movies, so the implication some of the animators took was that he wasn't taking his animated movie as seriously.
Well, I liked Anderson before he started making movies about talking foxes, but I can see your point about contrived nature of his directing, and also agree that animation was kind of an obvious step for him. If you're going to go with an "artificial" look, you might do well in a medium that is artificial by its very nature.
It's not so much that he's an acquired taste as you either don't like his movies or you do, and I don't think its not "getting" his movies, either. He's a director you can totally "get" and like even less than if you didn't "get" him than if you did. It's probably why he lost the Ursa Major; Cameron made a movie designed from the ground up to appeal to every single human being on the planet while Anderson made a movie designed to appeal to, well, Anderson, mostly. I mean, if some other people end up liking it, that's gravy and all, but it's his movie.
I also hear he did piss off some of his animators when he left the set for a trip to Paris. I believe the trip was business related and he just didn't take off on a lark, but I don't think he'd done such things on his previous movies, so the implication some of the animators took was that he wasn't taking his animated movie as seriously.