The Rat Catcher

I really loved this third Wes Anderson Roald Dahl short. 

There isn't a great deal of plot to this short- it's essentially an exploration of one character, an extremely creepy rat catcher. Ralph Fiennes plays the titular character and is superb at it, being genuinely unsettling. Richard Ayoade gets the bulk of the storytelling here and is great; there's something about him that works so well with Wes Anderson's style and I hope they are able to work together again in the future. 

The staging is a bit simpler than the preceding shorts, with the characters largely in one small environment and not walking around as much. The direction here is especially great even for Anderson and serves as a real showcase for his signature techniques.

These shorts have in some ways felt a bit like a cheap stage production in that any expensive props or animals are largely imagined. That remains the case for most of this short too but there is a gorgeous sequence featuring an animated rat in a style quite similar to <i>Fantastic Mr. Fox</i>. I love Anderson's animations and it was lovely to get a little bit of that here, though it would have been nice if the animation could have been used throughout the short rather than just for this one sequence.

A superb short where the words of Wes Anderson and Roald Dahl come together almost perfectly.