'The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar' is a Slice of Delightful Fluff

For the past decade, we’ve slowly watched every rising and established artist take up streaming on their offer of crazy money to make whatever they want before realizing that an algorithmically driven platform doesn’t care for their hard work and unique style. Netflix won’t curate or even functionally promote its own content if the powers that be aren’t sure it’ll be a megahit, leading to a lot of skepticism from filmmakers of merit when the big streamer services come knocking looking for prestigious, eye-catching content. And now they got our dear Wes.

In a sense, the king of quirk and saviour of symmetry, director Wes Anderson has gotten the best possible deal out of his Netflix collab; for their trouble, he’s given them something that’s difficult to either milk or bury, a short of about 39 minutes that’s nothing more than a slice of delightful fluff. That’s not to say audiences should dismiss it; The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar feels like we’re being invited into a very personal Wes Anderson space, where he makes a deep-cut his own while still venerating an author he clearly loves.

Henry Sugar is the title story in a collection that author Roald Dahl intended for a slightly older audience than his timeless children’s tales. It’s not as deliciously macabre or unnerving as some of his horror shorts, such as can be found in Skin, but as we can tell from the narration that carries straight into Anderson’s short, Dahl has heightened that “talking to kids as if they’re serious grown-ups” tone a couple degrees more. The joy of Dahl’s stories was that they felt like they respected their reader, no matter their age and no matter how childish and fantastical their contents.