Wes Anderson’s Short Films Are as Good as His Features, and a Blessing to Roald Dahl

2023 has quietly become Wes Anderson’s biggest year yet. Earlier this year, he released “Asteroid City,” in which a theater group performs a play about a remote town holding a competition of Junior Stargazers that becomes a TV special. It was a perplexing, enjoyable effort that expanded the scope of the filmmaker’s prolific catalog, playing with the layers of narrative that truthfully speak to creating art. It was also a huge year for the author Roald Dahl, whose estate is starting to see the impact of having sold his entire oeuvre to Netflix. The year started on a dark note, when Puffin bowdlerized his children’s novels, sanitizing them of “insensitive” and “non-inclusive” words such as “fat” and “ugly” — so much for Augustus Gloop. This butchery received widespread condemnation among people who have read or grew up with his books. Yet then in October, Mr. Anderson released an anthology of four short films on Netflix, based on four short stories that Dahl wrote for mature readers: “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” “The Swan,” “Poison,” and “The Rat Catcher.” All of which comes from “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More.”Mr. Anderson is no stranger to ensuring that the author’s spirit is alive in its cinematic form. His stop-motion adaptation of one of Dahl’s most famous books, “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” is one of his best films, showing his willingness to artistically grow with his asymmetrical style. It’s also perhaps the best adaptation of Dahl’s work because both artists’ penchant for whimsy and moralism are congruent with each other and bring an emotional pathos that no other film could achieve.Each short film features actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Rupert Friend, Dev Patel, and Richard Ayoade in multiple roles and all of them have the chance to narrate the events of each story. It’s as if we’re not watching a series of cinematic shorts but a novel being read out audibly. In “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” which is the longest at 47 minutes, Mr. Cumberbatch plays a socialite whose life was transformed upon meeting a guru who cannot see with his eyes (Ben Kingsley), resulting in him sharing much of his wealth. “The Swan” sees a young boy, in order to get back at his bullies, becoming a swan. “Poison” sees Mr. Cumberbatch play a man succumbing to a snake bite, while “The Rat Catcher” sees a reporter and a mechanic watching a professional rat killer. Let’s go through each shot one by one. “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” allows Mr. Anderson’s style to become his most detailed. The shorts display the most typical aspects of his style — asymmetrical framing, long tracking shots, and deadpan acting — and they play out precisely as expected. Reviews of “Henry Sugar” believed that it could have been one of his features, meaning it could be one of his best. Yet, more importantly, it is a compelling character study of a wealthy socialite using the culture of another place for altruistic purposes rather than for his own vanity. “The Swan” sees the same style play out but actually makes the moral conundrum — a boy trying to push back at his bullies — more urgent and the outcome is tragic but keeps its poignancy. “Poison” is incredibly funny, but its message is surprisingly blunt — don’t be prejudiced to people trying to help you. “The Rat Catcher” sees Mr. Anderson being interested in characters only being methodical, with the short showing how much we are in awe of eccentrics. For all of these shorts, the cast brings delightful performances, adhering to Mr. Anderson’s quirky sensibilities.What’s different about these shorts is that Mr. Anderson makes sure to highlight Dahl’s personal side, which the author poured into these stories for adults that he didn’t for his more well-known children’s books — Fiennes plays the role of Dahl narrating his own stories. Working with Dahl’s adult works also pushes Mr. Anderson to experiment further with layering his visual narratives, as we saw in his most recent full-length films. In “The French Dispatch,” we see articles from a print magazine given a cinematic treatment, as if we are reading that medium in real-time, while “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is a story within a story about a historical attraction. These efforts attempt to bring a deeper meaning to the text. That is why it’s empty for social media to reduce Mr. Anderson’s style to an artificial reading of simple and twee perfectionism. There are more short stories in Dahl’s collection for adults that have yet to receive an adaptation, but the quartet already being adapted has finally given these relatively little-known works — as compared to the children’s books — a wider audience. Mr. Anderson is not just making great films out of these novels. He’s providing a service.

Wes Anderson’s Short Films Are as Good as His Features, and a Blessing to Roald Dahl

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