Aaron Tracy

I took the text, the entire text, and I put it into my computer on an MS Word document and started just pulling what I thought I wanted, and I realized that what I wanted was for him to tell the story, for Dahl to tell the story.

My favorite of the Anderson doll films is Henry Sugar.

It stars Ralph Fiennes as Roald Dahl, alongside Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, and Ben Kingsley.

It tells the story of a wealthy gambler who learns to be able to see through playing cards, literally to look at the back of a card and see that it's the ace of spades or whatever.

He does this by practicing intense meditation for years.

Sugar uses his new power to win a fortune at casinos, until he finds the thrill empty and unfulfilling.

So, he devotes his winnings to establishing orphanages and hospitals around the world.

It's basically a story about the power of meditation and unrelenting hard work to make you a better, more generous person.

The inclusion of Dahl as a character in the film works especially well here because it feels like such a perfect fulfillment of Dahl's original intentions.

In his book, Dahl deliberately plays with our perception of the story as constructed artifice.

In other words, he breaks the fourth wall, reminding readers that he's an author spinning a tale.

Near the end of Dahl's story, the Dahl figure cheekily steps out of the narrative to speculate about what might happen if this were a fictional story rather than a totally factual account of real life.

Even though readers understand it's clearly fiction.

By casting an actor to play Dahl and read some of the actual prose from the book, Anderson mirrors this metafictional playfulness that began in Dahl's novella.

I want to briefly return to my conversation with Manuel Betancourt and hear his thoughts on the Roald Dahl-Wes Anderson connection.

including all the other interesting ways that Anderson finds to be faithful to Dahl's text.

It had seemed a better suited pair than I thought they'd be, both because Wes Anderson is, you know, we know him for this exacting, symmetrical, colorful diorama films.

And what I think he does, and he did so well with Henry Sugar and these other short films that he made for Netflix in 2023, based on Dahl's short stories, was...

reveal artistry and craftsmanship in how he elevated Dahl's prose.

He's not using voiceover.