Dreamlike: Exploring the Art of Color Expression in The Grand Budapest Hotel

Color is the perception of the world by the human eye and the human brain. With the emergence of color films, color has become one of the most intuitive and important audio-visual languages in films. Color theory has been developing and perfecting in modern times, providing theoretical support for the color expression of movies. American director Wes Anderson’s masterpiece The Grand Budapest Hotel won many awards including Oscars. Even though it’s been ten years since its release, its unique color expression is still celebrated. To study the representative picture of film, this paper first starts from the fundamentals of color harmony, with the help of the color palette tool, this paper explores the way of color harmony of representative pictures under the framework of Deane B. Judd’s color harmony principle. On the other hand, combined with color psychology theory, which explains how films can drive the narrative, guide the mood, and deepen the theme through color changes. Eventually arriving at Wes Anderson connects colors with theme, background, and plots, while realizing color harmony in the dynamic and static modes. The deep relationship between color, film theme, and background of the times is explored, and the balance between personal artistic expression and audience emotions is also perfectly achieved, which provides an excellent reference example for later generations.