Five out of Seven films in the Roald Dahl Collection on Netflix areWes Andersonfilms. They areThe Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,The Rat Catcher,The Swan,Poison, andThe Fantastic Mr. Fox. With the exception ofThe Fantastic Mr. Fox, all of these films are shorts, and they all come from the same project, so to speak, of filmmaking. They have the same cast in general and were all filmed at the same time. And we all know Wes Anderson has a very distinct style, but there’s something that makes these films different.
This group of short films andThe Fantastic Mr. Foxare all very distinct stories from Roald Dahl, as areBFGandMatilda,which also make up the collection, but with these short films, Wes Anderson has done something he has never done before. He has decided to tell dark, mysterious stories.
Normally, Wes Anderson will tell stories that are charming, delightful, and end happily, even if they are a little precarious along the way. But this time, Anderson has chosentales from Roald Dahlthat end in mystery and might even be considered frighteningly dark. But these movies are more quintessentially of Wes Anderson’s style than any others he’s made before.
The New Wes Anderson Shorts
While not many of these movies contain such giant twists, they’re short enough that mentioning even a few details might spoil them. So here’s your spoiler warning.
This most recent collection of Wes Anderson shorts is hugely different from most of his other movies and yet more purely an exhibition of his aesthetic. If you takeThe Rat Catcherto start, it’s filled with frightening characters, disgusting images, and even blood, which we almost never see in a Wes Anderson film. If you were to go on watchingThe SwanandPoison, you’d notice that this motif of death and fear continues through each one. It’s not somethingwe see from this directorvery often.
InThe Rat Catcher,our titular character stares down a rat until he’s able to bite it to death. InThe Swan,a boy is bullied until he’s shot, and the bullies never receive any kind of comeuppance for what they’ve done. InPoison,we’re constantly afraid a man is about to be bitten by a snake. While these are normal themes for Roald Dahl, we almost never see things like this in Wes Anderson movies.
What makes it more interesting is that he could have easily chosen other stories. These short stories don’t come from the same collected works, nor are they tied together by any sort of narrative.The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugarends quite, well, wonderfully, but is equally as mysterious as the rest. Perhaps that is what ties the movies together: their individual qualities ofmagical or supernaturaloccurrences.
Now, here’s where you really shouldn’t read if you don’t want the endings spoiled. InThe Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, the main character gains supernatural powers through yogic meditation. InThe Swan, a boy has swan wings strapped to his arms, and it’s implied he’s able to fly from high up in a tree. InPoison, a snake mysteriously vanishes, though that might just be the character lying. And inThe Rat Catcher,there is something mysteriousinside a hut feeding the rats, and the titular character might be more rat than man.
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How All of These Movies Are the Most Wes Anderson Yet
In an interview with the Associated Press, Wes Anderson compares Roald Dahl’s work to Renoir, saying that a painter wouldn’t try to improve upon Renoir’s work. In this way,Anderson hasn’t tried to improveupon Dahl’s stories. In this collection, he’s told them all word for word, so what we get out of Wes Anderson making these short films is the visual aspect of the film.
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Anderson has been influenced by Dahl before, most obviously inThe Fantastic Mr. Fox, but perhaps now, we can see the other place the author had a massive effect was in the pacing of his dialogue. But all the things he adds to these stories are everything visual about the filmmaker. The set changes happen in a carefully choreographed ballet with pull-away set pieces. The scenes are more often than not composed intolong, single shots. The actors often have expressionless faces and, since these are all short stories, speak directly to the audience.
As Wes Anderson has grown as an artist, he’s slowly created the style for which we’ve all come to love him. And you might say that now he’s self-aware of it since we’re all talking about it so much, he’s just taken all those elements he’s known for (the 90-degree pan, the pastel colors, the still images) and used those explicitly to change Roald Dahl’s short stories from a literary experience into a visual one.
