The whimsical world of Wes Anderson has returned in Moonrise Kingdom, his seventh feature
film and just the latest to be populated by characters from a fantasy vision of
the world that lies just beyond anyone’s actual experience of it. Anderson
likes to set his films in veritable islands unto themselves: a Manhattan
mansion that seems part of a fictionalized New York I’ve never seen; a private
school that offers a most ambitious student a lot of leeway; a train across the
Indian subcontinent; a submarine (that one offered up his most capricious film
to date); and now a literal island that looks (on the map presented by Bob
Balaban’s on camera narrator) a little like Fisher’s Island, NY.
