May 30, 2012  Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical. 'Moonrise Kingdom' creates such a world and takes place on an island that might as well be ruled by Prospero. May 25, 2012  Parents need to know that Moonrise Kingdom- a 1960s-set dramedy about two misfit tweens who run away with each other - is, like most of director Wes Anderson's other films, atmospheric and loopy and moving: a mix that might confound younger audiences, even though the movie is about kids. Plus, the stories of their home lives are actually.

Let's try to understand the miracle I have just witnessed. Director Wes Anderson is 12 years old, has just experienced his first love while at Summer camp, and immediately rushed to a camera to tell us, his pen pals, the story. A slightly embellished story which follows the perfect scenarios we would draw at night in our beds at this age. It has all the tiny details, the sense of adventure and the freshness of youth. How someone 43 years old in real life could do this movie is beyond me.

The drawback of this miracle for the viewer is that such a jump back into the kind of idealized feelings you had in your early teens leaves you with quite some melancholy when you leave the cinema. It could be that some people do not connect to the movie and just see it as 'adorable' or 'cute' and nothing more. But I suppose most people will feel connected, notably because the movie has this straight-to-the-point attitude in both the technique and the story-telling; the story is read to you, not force-fed with dramatic music and whatnot. Just like one of the characters who reads bedtime stories to the others. You might complain about the lack of character development for some of the big names in this film (Norton, Willis, Murray - McDormand less so as she gets more detailed screen time than the others) but I suppose this is wanted: kids will see hints of the issues adults are facing, but can't understand them fully. And remember this is a movie shot by 12-year old Wes Anderson.

Wes Anderson makes films about small worlds in which big things happen: love, heartbreak, calamities, death. In his latest, the wondrous storybook tale “Moonrise Kingdom,” a girl and a boy, both 12, run off to a remote inlet on an island where most of the adults seem disappointed and more than a little sad. The girl and the boy are very serious — about love, their plans, books, life itself — and often act older than their age. She wears bright blue eyeliner; he puffs on a corncob pipe. You wonder what their hurry is, given that here adulthood, with its quarrels, regrets and anguished pillow talk, can feel as dangerous as the storm that’s hurtling toward the island, ready to blow it all down.The two young romantics in “Moonrise Kingdom,” which the 65th Cannes Film Festival on May 16, are gifted and, according to grown-ups who are supposed to know about such things, problem children. Suzy (Kara Hayward) definitely knows this about herself because she discovered a copy of a pamphlet, “Coping With the Very Troubled Child,” on top of the family fridge. She does have a temper, but she also has three younger brothers, which may help explain her tantrums. Construction simulator 2019.

Yet, like many characters in Mr. Anderson’s films, she’s also troubled on a deeper level, beset by an existential despair that waned when, while getting ready for a performance of Benjamin Britten’s opera “Noye’s Fludde” a year earlier, she met her match, her soul mate, her co-conspirator, Sam (Jared Gilman).The film opens shortly before the two rendezvous in a field — she brings her favorite books in a suitcase; he brings her flowers and the camping gear — and head off on a journey that’s part quest, part romance, with a touch of film noir and a hint of the French New Wave. Along the way, there are dangers, both natural and human, and finally paradise, in a small, pretty cove they rename Moonrise Kingdom. (Working with his regular cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, Mr. Anderson softens the colors and gives them the slight tint of a faded Polaroid photograph.) There, with a tent, a French pop song and unembarrassed honesty (Sam warns Suzy that he may wet the bed), they consummate, metaphorically, an enchanted, chaste affair capped with a hilariously symbolic deflowering.