Introduced by Kingdom’s narrator, played by Bob Balaban, the video brings to life passages from some of the books kept by Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) in the suitcase she brings on her adventure with Sam (Jared Gilman).
While Anderson had originally planned to illustrate the stories using animation, he ultimately went another way, but the idea stuck. “I wrote passages for the other books that didn’t have any text read aloud in the film, and we animated that too,” he tells EW. “So we now have this piece where our narrator, Bob Balaban’s character, takes us through these little sections of each of these books.”
To pull off the animated shorts in just six scant weeks, Moonrise Kingdom and Fantastic Mr. Fox producer Jeremy Dawson worked to pair each of the cover jacket artists with professional animators. "We got the artist to do key drawings, and then someone else had to take those key drawings and animate them," he says. "One of these guys I believe was in Sweden, one in Paris, and one in L.A. They were all over the world and we did it all by Internet. For instance, the one with the hydrogoblin, The Girl From Jupiter -- that artist does his work in oil painting, so someone had to kind of emulate that oil painting look in the animation."
There are no spoilers for the film so go ahead and take a look.
Animated Book Short
