The Pop Aesthetic

The New York Times said of Wes Anderson—around the release of his fourth film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou—that he was one of the only American filmmakers with a distinctive visual style, putting the relatively young and niche director in the ridiculously small and enviable company of Quentin Tarantino and… well, that’s about it. Indeed, Anderson’s style of center-framed subjects, vintage wallpaper, handcrafted models, deadpan and Futura Bold was so recognizably his own that it bordered on self-parody. People grew tired of it. Every hipster in the United States can quote Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums verbatim, but precious few are willing to venture an opinion on 2007′s The Darjeeling Limited or even remember his 2009 stop-motion feature adapting Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Now here we are, in 2012 with the trailer for a brand-new Wes Anderson movie that looks to be the most Wes Anderson-styled film in the history on cinema. We should all be excessively tired of this by now, shouldn’t we? No. No, we are not even the slightest bit disinterested in Moonrise Kingdom. If anything, this film looks to be the glorious return to form that Anderson fans felt was somehow lacking in Darjeeling and Fox. Take a look:

Instantly noteworthy: this is Anderson’s seventh feature, the sixth consecutive film with Bill Murray (clearly they get along) and the first without Owen Wilson (whom, many would argue, would have no career without Anderson, and possibly vice versa). All of the Anderson tropes are on display: overtly mundane costuming, exaggerated impossible romance, children attempting to act more adult than their parents, the color yellow (everywhere), rebellion linked to rock music and nudity, neatly arranged everything as though the entire film were close-up photographs of a middle-school diorama, and truckloads on ennui. This trailer plays out as though Wes Anderson watched all of his previous films, wrote down his favorite visual gags and decided to craft a two-minute trailer that highlighted all of them and later expand that short into a feature-length film. And goddamn, does it work.

There are just so many visual concepts to be completely and utterly excited about here. The idea that a boy would break out of his tent Shawshank Redemption-style with a poster over a hole in the tarp; two young lovers on opposite ends of a lake, leaping in simultaneously; the treehouse perched atop the most frail looking twig of a tree since Charlie Brown’s Christmas; the smoking dirtbike wedged in a tree just off the edge of a cliff; the scout with shrubbery on his helmet as camouflage carrying a large stick that resembles a sledgehammer with various humorously large nails poking out of its head; a boy being struck by lightning; and I’m pretty sure that was a doghouse on fire. And how can you not love Bruce Willis deputizing a group of scouts based on glib physical appearances? Everything about this trailer screams absurdist retro modern storybook romance, which are five of our very favorite words, so obviously we are wildly enthusiastic about this.

Moonrise Kingdom is scheduled for a release in France and Belgium in May, with a limited release in the United States the same month. We expect it should be hitting a theater near you sometime this summer.