CAT OF THE DAY 073: MOONRISE KINGDOM

CAT OF THE DAY 073: MOONRISE KINGDOM (2012)

Wes Anderson’s fable, set on an island off the coast of New England in 1965, is silly, sweet, romantic and altogether adorable. The eclectic soundtrack features Benjamin Britten, Hank Williams, Françoise Hardy and Alexandre Desplat.

On 2nd June, 2012 I posted this on Ryan Gilbey‘s FaceBook wall :

Loved it. A children’s adventure for adults. I think Anderson’s films look as though they’ve been made by a precocious 12 year old, and the reason this and Rushmore work so well is that the emotion in them seems authentic, albeit of the sort that might be experienced by a 12 year old, whereas the emotion in his other films (apart from Mr Fox) is like a 12 year old’s fuzzy notion of what grown-up emotions might be.

I didn’t mention the cat, though Moonrise Kingdom contains a recurring kitten motif. Twelve-year-old Suzy (Kara Hayward) is inseparable from her kitten; we see it in one of the very first frames. Then when she elopes with 12-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman), she takes the kitten along with her, in a cat-basket. The couple sets up camp on an idyllic beach (they call it “Moonrise Kingdom”), and the kitten is very much a part of their innocent yet intensely romantic ménage.

There’s an adorable dog in the film too; the dog comes to a sad end, but at no time is the kitten ever imperilled.

Later in the film, we see the kitten grown into a young cat, to denote the passage of time, a narrative device that can also be seen in Little Women (1994), the subject of CAT OF THE DAY 065.

A Happy New Year to all cats everywhere!

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• ‘Zero Dark Thirty’: Composer Alexandre Desplat Talks Musical Suspense (moviesblog.mtv.com)
• Fleming Q&A’s ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ Director Wes Anderson (m.deadline.com)
• A Conversation with Alexandre Desplat (wqxr.org)