The Data Drop · No. 035

The Colors of
Wes Anderson

704 frames. 11 films. 30 years of cinema.
Every dominant color extracted, mapped, and arranged.
Scroll
1996 · Bottle Rocket

Where it all begins

Anderson's debut is raw, naturalistic, almost un-Anderson. The palette is muted earth tones: browns, grays, steel blues. No symmetry mania yet. No pastels. Just Texas heat and VHS warmth.

1998–2001 · Rushmore → Tenenbaums

The signature emerges

By Rushmore, the browns deepen. By The Royal Tenenbaums, something shifts: warm ambers and caramels take over. The first golden palette, the first hint of the Anderson everyone will come to know.

2004–2007 · Life Aquatic → Darjeeling

The warm period

Deep mahoganies. Indian golds. The Darjeeling Limited is drenched in saffron and amber, his warmest film by far. Life Aquatic adds ocean teals as a counterweight. Two films, one obsession: rich, saturated warmth.

2009 · Fantastic Mr. Fox

Stop-motion unlocks pure color

His first animated film, and suddenly every pixel is designed. Fox orange dominates: burnt sienna, autumn gold, chestnut brown. When you control every surface, the palette becomes absolute.

2012–2014 · Moonrise → Budapest

The pastel revolution

Moonrise Kingdom glows honey-gold. Then Grand Budapest Hotel does something unprecedented: dusty rose and plum consume the frame. The most chromatically extreme film of his career, and his most acclaimed.

2018 · Isle of Dogs

The monochrome retreat

After Budapest's color maximalism, a deliberate pullback. Cream and charcoal dominate. It's his most desaturated film: a stop-motion dystopia where color is rationed, not celebrated.

2021–2023 · French Dispatch → Asteroid City

The silver age

The French Dispatch goes near-monochrome: silver grays, cool neutrals, deliberate absence of Anderson warmth. Asteroid City brings back desert hues but muted, controlled.

1996–2023 · The Full Arc

A career in color

Across 11 films and 704 frames, one truth: Anderson's world is built on warm browns and earth tones. The pastels everyone associates with him? They're vivid punctuation marks in an otherwise grounded palette.

The palettes
Every Wes Anderson film, color by color

This page takes 704 frames from Wes Anderson's eleven feature films, between 61 and 65 frames from each one, pulls the dominant colors out of every frame, and then merges them into a palette of twelve colors per film, with each color weighted by how much of the sampled frames it covers.

Across the whole career the single most common color is a near-black brown, hex #151211, which covers 16.6 percent of the sampled frames, and the next five places all go to dark browns and greys, so the pastels people associate with Anderson are real but sit on top of a mostly brown and shadowed screen.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is the clearest exception among the eleven, because two of its top four colors are the dusty rose tones #6a4845 and #9b635a, and The French Dispatch is the coldest, with a near-black #131213 covering 27 percent of its frames and the rest of its top four in grey.

Isle of Dogs is the only film where a near-white makes the top two, an off-white #eee5db at 11 percent that matches the cream and charcoal look of its stop-motion sets, while The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited carry the warmest browns and ambers of the eleven.

Below, each film is listed with its year, its runtime, the number of frames sampled and its full twelve-color palette in order of weight, and the film browser and color explorer further down let you open every frame and copy any hex code.

Bottle Rocket 1996 · 91 minutes · 65 frames sampled

  1. #1e160f 20.1%
  2. #3f3930 16.3%
  3. #302a1e 16.1%
  4. #635959 9.7%
  5. #726e77 8.5%
  6. #504947 7.9%
  7. #9c8f95 6.3%
  8. #d3c2c3 4.2%
  9. #5177a8 3.7%
  10. #2a3956 2.9%
  11. #2c5596 2.8%
  12. #672216 1.6%

Rushmore 1998 · 93 minutes · 61 frames sampled

  1. #17120e 20.3%
  2. #43362a 18.2%
  3. #2f241c 16.8%
  4. #54493a 12.2%
  5. #73695e 8.3%
  6. #65574b 7.9%
  7. #29130d 6.3%
  8. #888180 3.4%
  9. #0f3334 2.6%
  10. #9f9da4 2.4%
  11. #711818 0.9%
  12. #c3c2c8 0.8%

The Royal Tenenbaums 2001 · 110 minutes · 62 frames sampled

  1. #21190f 19.7%
  2. #4a2d17 18.6%
  3. #704826 16.8%
  4. #93693b 10.9%
  5. #b18555 9.0%
  6. #cea171 6.1%
  7. #a74415 5.0%
  8. #e5caa0 3.9%
  9. #e3ead4 3.1%
  10. #2f5e74 2.9%
  11. #4ba8d5 2.3%
  12. #df7f0b 1.6%

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou 2004 · 119 minutes · 65 frames sampled

  1. #2d150b 17.4%
  2. #7f563b 12.6%
  3. #4e2b17 12.1%
  4. #723c19 11.7%
  5. #997b5f 9.4%
  6. #a99887 7.6%
  7. #534d4a 7.5%
  8. #12101d 6.9%
  9. #606f7b 5.4%
  10. #d0c3b1 4.4%
  11. #113d4f 3.8%
  12. #8dabc6 1.1%

The Darjeeling Limited 2007 · 91 minutes · 63 frames sampled

  1. #251a0b 15.9%
  2. #492e0f 13.3%
  3. #9a7a51 10.3%
  4. #784511 9.7%
  5. #06161e 8.6%
  6. #52432c 8.4%
  7. #a99a81 7.6%
  8. #775e3f 7.2%
  9. #9d5f13 5.3%
  10. #c7c2ab 5.2%
  11. #183845 5.1%
  12. #636c6f 3.4%

Fantastic Mr. Fox 2009 · 87 minutes · 65 frames sampled

  1. #18150b 22.9%
  2. #392711 19.6%
  3. #6a3a16 8.5%
  4. #4e3c27 7.8%
  5. #9f7a59 7.2%
  6. #935422 6.7%
  7. #bb7326 6.7%
  8. #ae9a87 6.2%
  9. #72583f 5.4%
  10. #011b39 3.3%
  11. #d5bb9a 3.0%
  12. #e1a73c 2.7%

Moonrise Kingdom 2012 · 94 minutes · 65 frames sampled

  1. #2f1f0d 17.3%
  2. #18110c 14.7%
  3. #4a300d 14.4%
  4. #6b4d18 14.1%
  5. #3f3c31 7.8%
  6. #87673b 7.4%
  7. #898366 6.8%
  8. #a6a680 5.7%
  9. #021131 5.1%
  10. #606352 4.8%
  11. #870904 1.4%
  12. #c78d02 0.5%

The Grand Budapest Hotel 2014 · 100 minutes · 64 frames sampled

  1. #100e13 14.3%
  2. #2b1b19 13.3%
  3. #6a4845 12.6%
  4. #9b635a 11.5%
  5. #532a20 10.2%
  6. #1c314c 7.7%
  7. #e3cecd 7.6%
  8. #d69a94 7.5%
  9. #94858e 6.5%
  10. #2a658a 4.8%
  11. #952213 3.4%
  12. #d89319 0.7%

Isle of Dogs 2018 · 101 minutes · 65 frames sampled

  1. #1b120f 20.6%
  2. #eee5db 10.6%
  3. #3f3632 10.2%
  4. #665a4b 8.8%
  5. #3e1d13 8.8%
  6. #94816f 8.1%
  7. #d5c1b4 7.9%
  8. #b6a192 6.4%
  9. #c9a24e 5.7%
  10. #783013 5.0%
  11. #986934 4.8%
  12. #e2c676 3.2%

The French Dispatch 2021 · 107 minutes · 65 frames sampled

  1. #131213 26.7%
  2. #25272c 13.1%
  3. #575654 12.7%
  4. #3f4143 11.6%
  5. #736b62 9.1%
  6. #84847b 6.9%
  7. #4c3528 4.5%
  8. #9a9e98 4.1%
  9. #705024 3.6%
  10. #987314 2.9%
  11. #540e06 2.6%
  12. #cfd2c9 2.1%

Asteroid City 2023 · 105 minutes · 64 frames sampled

  1. #171614 17.2%
  2. #615a4c 15.2%
  3. #9f9e78 12.7%
  4. #2f2c28 11.3%
  5. #384844 9.6%
  6. #74816c 9.5%
  7. #8d7450 7.9%
  8. #bacaa0 4.9%
  9. #5dd1c0 3.6%
  10. #409f8e 3.5%
  11. #066402 2.9%
  12. #8e2215 1.6%
Chapter II
Browse Every Film
Click any film to explore its frames and extracted colors
Chapter III
Every Extracted Color
132 palette colors across 11 films. Hover to explore, click to copy
Film
Scene Match
Film Palette
☕Buy me a coffee