What do you think of the trailer for Moonrise Kingdom?
The first trailer for Moonrise Kingdom, the seventh feature film from director Wes Anderson, hit the internet Thursday. The film is Anderson's first live-action feature since 2007's The Darjeeling Limited. In 2009 Anderson directed the stop-motion animated Fantastic Mr. Fox.
The film brings back several familiar faces from previous Anderson films like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, including Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman, alongside new additions Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Tilda Swinton and Frances McDormand.
Reaction to the trailer has largely focused on Anderson's signature style that has earned him fans, detractors and imitators.
Slate's Browbeat blog notes:
Even though Anderson has never made a period picture (this one is set in the 1960s), and has never made a movie focused so squarely on children (though it is not a children’s movie: note the PG-13 rating), somehow it still feels as though we have taken one step closer to the Platonic ideal of a Wes Anderson Movie.
HitFix's Drew McWeeny graded the trailer an A-, calling it "sort of awesome."
IFC's Fix was less enthused than some:
It felt a bit too familiar to me, but when I joked on Twitter that the “New Wes Anderson movie looks exactly like all other Wes Anderson movies,” I immediately got half a dozen responses all on the order of “I KNOW! I CAN’T WAIT!”
The AV Club notes that the trailer does not even need to have included Anderson's name to have been recognizable.
For all the talk of similarities to his previous work, others saw signs of changes. Entertainment Weekly's Inside Movies writes:
[Anderson] has only sharpened his distinctive visual quirkiness post-Mr. Fox – if anything, some of the film looks like Anderson was inspired by the notion of trying to make an “animated” film using live action.
While The Guardian's Film blog writes that it's a relief to once again encounter the familiar and distinctive components of Wes Anderson's world.
Love it or hate it, the Washington Post's Style blog calls the release of a new Wes Anderson trailer a "capital-E Event."
What do you think of the trailer for Moonrise Kingdom?