Even for Wes Anderson, Netflix’s Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is a charming oddity

polygon.com:

This review of Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar comes from the film’s premiere at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival. The film will be released later this September.

Earlier this year, Wes Anderson released the charming, melancholy Asteroid City. It bore his signature children’s pop-up book style, but in order to chip away at the hardened layers of grief, he presented his usual flourishes with uncanny restraint. His second release of 2023, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,rushes in the opposite direction, replacing mournful silences with the nonstop rattle of narration while building exuberant layers of eye-popping façade.

A 40-minute adaptation of a 70-page story, Henry Sugar is as much Anderson’s version of the tale as it is an ode to the author, Roald Dahl. (Anderson previously adapted one of Dahl’s other children’s books, 1970’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.) In fact, Dahl’s short — part of the short-story collection The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More — is so uniquely suited to Anderson’s sensibilities, with its multi-layered narrative and imaginative whimsy, that this project is the closest page-to-screen translation in cinema.

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That may sound like hyperbole, but the way Anderson uses Dahl’s text verges on experimental. It isn’t the basis for his script, it’s the script