I’m not one to complain about new material from one of my favorite filmmakers, but there’s something about Wes Anderson's new collection of Roald Dahl shorts that feels so unimportant. Maybe the problem is that it comes mere months after Anderson’s stellar “Asteroid City” and pales in comparison to a film that’s still so fresh in the mind. Maybe it’s Netflix’s handling of the release, putting each film on the service individually and with minimal fanfare in a way that doesn’t allow the shorts to work together. But does every work of art need to be important? I guess not, as much as I would like them to be. Sometimes artists need to flex their muscles, see what they can do with their medium, and try things that may be too risky to try in their bigger projects. That seems to be what Anderson has done with this new short film collection.
These shorts feel like the final piece of a thematic trilogy about the nature of storytelling in film that includes “The French Dispatch” and “Asteroid City.” These aren’t the only of Anderson’s films that deal with cinematic storytelling, but these last three films have seemed far more interested in how to tell their stories and the meaning that can come from structure as opposed to just content. “The French Dispatch,” in particular, feels like the film this collection is most in conversation with. That film is Anderson trying to tell several different stories that are each able to stand on their own and feel like they are being told by each of these characters with unique voices and writing styles. The tension (and fun) is seeing Anderson try to tie these different segments together in a thematically cohesive way despite the surface-level content of each being so varied.
In these shorts, Anderson is telling stories all written by the same person, and he has to find ways to formally differentiate them enough to justify making four individual Dahl shorts. Sometimes this comes from changing up the aspect ratio, the color grading, or going from smooth static shots to frantic handheld — ”Poison” does this the best, capturing the chaos and explosion of pent-up anxiety by going back to the frenetic camera movements Anderson used a lot more in his pre-“Fantastic Mr. Fox” days. Anderson also reinforces the importance of the storyteller as an ever-present figure in the story itself no matter the perspective of the characters, cutting to Ralph Fiennes as Roald Dahl in each short to get the last word.
With this new collection, Anderson isn’t satisfied taking the same approach to adapting Dahl’s work as he did with “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Apart from the obvious switch from animation to live-action, the previous feature is a far looser adaptation. Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach mold the source material into something that puts Anderson’s voice front and center. These new shorts, however, are almost religiously faithful to Dahl’s stories — each one is recited nearly in full by a character on screen and there are no digressions from the original story. Every short moves at a blistering pace to get through Dahl’s prose, to the point where it becomes an information overload at times.
It’s tough to say how much of my disappointment with this short film collection is down to Anderson’s handling of the source material or just the material itself. The shorts’ formal elements are up there with some of Anderson’s finest work to date — a truly breathtaking visual experience that sadly is unavailable to view in theaters. Perhaps I was just wanting something a little thornier from Dahl’s stories, most of which are aimed at children (albeit older children), and apart from “Poison”’s criticisms of British colonialism in India, they rarely reach for any sort of larger statement about societal ills. Had Anderson tried to deviate from the source material a bit more, it could have worked on more levels than it is. For fans of Dahl’s stories as they are, I imagine this short film collection will be among their favorite things Anderson has ever made. For the rest, it’s a minor work.
