Wes Anderson’s new short for Netflix is a slight piece of amusement based on Roald Dahl; at 37 minutes long, its brevity perhaps exposes or even creates a flimsiness in his signature style that in a longer film would have more space to breathe and parade itself. And perhaps this could just as easily have been a full-length feature.
It is Anderson’s second Dahl adaptation, after the animated Fantastic Mr Fox from 2009. This is not one of Dahl’s famous children’s tales, but instead from a 1977 collection intended for older teens: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, twisty stories halfway in tone between his young fiction and the cynical, macabre adult pieces with which he started out, and maybe the nearest Dahl came to YA. And yet there’s something gentle and almost anodyne in the denouement – atypical for both Dahl and Anderson.
