The Royal Tenenbaums Film Analysis

I chose The Royal Tenenbaums for analyzing in my semester project paper. It is a comedy film directed by Wes Anderson released in 2001. Film is created around a distorted family and their relationships. Father lefts the family and starts to live in a hotel for a long time. To extinguish his family’s hatred to him, he makes up a story with he has cancer and he is going to die. I will be analyzing the mise-en-scene and narrative from the movie. I selected the opening (establishing) scene of the movie for further analyze. In Wes Anderson movies the main genre is comedy. He combines comedy with absurdity and melancholia. Most characters have some insecurities, obsessions and oddity. Narrative rhythms are very precipitous and the visual side of his movies pull up with

I chose to analyze the first 6 seconds approximately which I think recapitulate the Wes Anderson thinking about the cinema. Within these 6 minutes, Anderson introduces the characters to us, briefly tells their past life, clears characters’s goals and unites it to the further part of the movie. As audience, we can understand what we can expect from the movie after this 6 minutes establishing. The movies starts with the production studio’s logos and etc. Then we see the narrator opens a book called “The Royal Tenenbaums”. (1) Next to the book there is the library stamp which gives a hint that this book belongs to a library; a symbolic way of saying this a classic/retro story which narrator is going to tell. Narrator stamps the book and the story begins. Then we see plate between two candelabras which is perfectly symmetrical. Next to the plate there is a mouse shifts the balance to left but not ruining the symmetry which I think Anderson put it for an absurd purpose. In the plate there is a card which says “cordially request the pleasure of the company at home” (Anderson 2001) meaning this movie is an invitation to the audience as it is a wedding or a