The Life Aquatic with Steve ZIssou

Plot:

Internationally famous oceanographer

Steve Zissou and his crew

– Team

Zissou –set sail on an expedition to hunt down the mysterious, elusive, possibly non-existent Jaguar Shark that killed Zissou’s partner during the documentary filming of their latest adventure. A young airline co-pilot who may or may not be Zissou’s son, a beautiful journalist assigned to write a profile of Zissou, and Zissou’s estranged wife and co-producer, Eleanor, joins them on their voyage. They face overwhelming complications including pirates, kidnapping, and bankruptcy.

Becauseof the success of The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson was able to gain a much larger budget for his next film, a total of $50 million. Due to the rising demand of Owen Wilson as an actor, Anderson partnered with Noah Baumbach to write what became The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

The film is mainly about an internationally famous oceanographer Steve Zissou and his crew – Team Zissou – set sail on an expedition to hunt down the mysterious, elusive, possibly non-existent Jaguar Shark that killed Zissou’s partner during the documentary filming of their latest adventure.

Though the film is live-action, many of the sea creatures in the film are animated, marking the first use of animation in any Anderson film. Anderson again hired Bill Murray, whom in a 2002 interview with The Telegraph he called “[some]one that I’m most likely to describe as a genius,” to act in the film, but this time as the lead.

The Life Aquatic posed the biggest filming challenge Anderson had faced, as detailed in a New York Magazine interview: “You’d get all these pirates on one ship, and then get the main actors in place, and a boat positioned behind them so the viewer could get some perspective on the scale we were working with, and the boats are heaving back and forth, and by the time you get everything all set up, the sun is gone.” At its 2004 release, the movie met with mixed critical reviews and even received some criticism from the core group of fans Anderson had garnered since the release of his first film.

Also at the time of The Life Aquatic’s release, many critics began noting the importance of fa- ther figures in Anderson’s movies. The Royal Tenenbaums had revolved around a once-famous lawyer patriarch who had been uninvolved in his family for decades, and a huge point of The Life Aquatic’s story line dealt with a character named Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson) trying to determine whether Zissou is his longlost father.

In response, Anderson mused to New York Mag: “I finally realized it’s just the opposite of what I really grew up with, and for me there’s something exotic about it… I’m drawn to those father-figure characters that are largerthan-life people , and I’ve sought out mentors who are like that, so I relate to them. But they’re not my father.”