I’m really trying to place the tone/aesthetic A Series of Unfortunate Events reminds me of. Like, it kind of reminds of Wes Anderson, but not really/at least not entirely?
Maybe it’s just a children’s book thing? I feel like you could adopt The Witches or a few other Roald Dahl books and hit basically the same tone? Like deliberate artifice to the point of being nearly surreal, storybook logic except when that doesn’t work at all?
Like, everything’s all exaggerated and comic and it seems like, even if the villains are cartoonishly awful, they’re still like, cartoons and their plots will be foiled and everyone will be okay. And then a likable recurring character gets buried alive in curry, or poisoned to death, or eaten by a pack of starving lions, or etc. But the violence is still presented in a vaguely slapstick manner, with nothing you couldn’t show with a PG rating actually showing up on screen.
It’s a really particular aesthetic, is what I’m saying, and really messing with the instinctive predictions I make about how things are going to turn out, which is both disconcerting and pleasantly surprising.
