Wes Anderson
2009
88 minutes
Oh, goddammit. This is going to be fine, you guess. You're almost never a fan of this style of animation, at least not in some big-budget sense. It's going to have a cast of thousands of famous people who want to record five lines of voiceover work to be in a Wes Anderson film. It just feels like you're going into a circle-jerk and you're expected to like it because you can walk away from it after watching the credits and note to friends afterwards, "Oooh, did you catch that celebrity chef and soon-to-be me-too persona non grata Mario Batali was the voice of Mister Capybara" or what-the-fuck-ever.
People are going to recommend this film to you until you watch it. You burn to hate it, and you won't. It's fine. It's fucking Roald Dahl. It feels like someone spent a billion dollars gorgeously animating an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine or something. You will feel as stupid for liking this as you will for ignorantly hating it. Just watch it with the knowledge that you will be responsible for knowing that the voices were done by George Clooney or Jude Law or Penelope Cruz or whoever the fuck is in this thing not showing their face, spending ten minutes recording their lines for some harried but star-struck sound engineer, and then cracking champagne afterwards with Wes Anderson and all their star friends while having sex in limousines while Frank Sinatra songs play on the radio.
Eat it and move on. It's not bad.
Time to choose something different: