it is quite the cast. but the leads are the two little kids pictured--which i imagine will and has been off-putting for a lot of viewers. best supporting role to bruce willis.
saw it again today.
it's a great movie. adorable and more. follows the structure, themes, and motifs of young adult fantasy novels and series like The Amber Spyglass, Harry Potter, and of course the Narnia books. within the story, a character is obsessed with fictionalized versions of those books.
so the movie is exploring reality and fantasy. individual realities and a universal reality. the first viewing i had trouble being ok with the ending. softened up to it a little on the second. though two individual realities cannot truly mix, they do in this movie. which is awesome. there is the fantasy. i would have liked to see that conjoined reality completely diverge from the external or universal reality. but i'm ok with the idea that the universal reality shifts in accordance with this magical, impossible shared reality that the kids create through love. [spoil]and i like that, in a literal sense, the kingdom is washed away.[/spoil] attempts can be made to externalize representations of it, like the painting, but it only exists inside them. and only ever did, because it is not a location. it is a single thought shared by two individuals. like Pierrot le fou, but in wes anderson's version the lovers are able to achieve this impossibility.
also, my usual complaint is that wes anderson movies is recycling his characters and ideas. i didn't mind that so much in this one. the tent scene where sam consoles suzy. just like the tent scene in The Royal Tenenbaums. how similar suzy is to margot, and how she doesn't fit in with her family and wishes to be an orphan. feels more like an intentional nod than a rip-off. if he can't stop it, i guess embracing it and weaving something out of it is cool.