Last week, Wes Anderson let slip that he would be putting a short film based on his latest release, Moonrise Kingdom, onto the web for us all to enjoy. The short has now arrived and can be seen over at Entertainment Weekly.
Introduced by Kingdom’s narrator, played by Bob Balaban, the video brings to life passages from some of the books kept by Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) in the suitcase she brings on her adventure with Sam (Jared Gilman).
While Anderson had originally planned to illustrate the stories using animation, he ultimately went another way, but the idea stuck. “I wrote passages for the other books that didn’t have any text read aloud in the film, and we animated that too,” he tells EW. “So we now have this piece where our narrator, Bob Balaban’s character, takes us through these little sections of each of these books.”
To get them made, Anderson turned to his Fantastic Mr Fox (and Moonrise Kingdom) producer Jeremy Dawson, who paired up the artist of each fake book’s jacket with an animator. "We got the artist to do key drawings, and then someone else had to take those key drawings and animate them," he says. "One of these guys I believe was in Sweden, one in Paris, and one in LA. They were all over the world and we did it all by Internet. For instance, the one with the hydrogoblin, The Girl From Jupiter – that artist does his work in oil painting, so someone had to kind of emulate that oil painting look in the animation."
For more on bringing the books to life, head to EW. And in case you’re concerned, there are no spoilers for the movie in the short.