When I read that writer-director Wes Anderson was doing another Roald Dahl adaptation, this time the 1977 fantasy The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, I decided to check it out only because I’d liked 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, his earlier Dahl effort, so much. That’s the only Wes Anderson film I still have a complete fondness for, now that I’m so soured on his work it’s even ruined the memory of The Royal Tenenbaums for me.

I was hoping for another delightful and inventive stop-motion animated film in the vein of Fantastic Mr. Fox, but The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is just another regular live-action Wes Anderson film. Shorter than most at thirty-nine minutes, this is the first of four short-film Dahl adaptations Anderson has been contracted to do for Netflix — the others are The Swan, Poison, and Ratcatcher. But Henry Sugar is the same old, same old for Anderson: A-list actors declaiming in an ironic deadpan manner to the camera, pretty-colored production design elements sliding in and out of scenes like theater flats, and narrated flashbacks creating a nesting-box story-within-a-story structure. You know the drill.

“In a way, it’s almost more like a little theatrical presentation that we found a way to film,” Anderson told reporters at the Venice Film Festival, where Henry Sugar premiered. He claims it “had taken years to decide how to shoot the story.”