Wes Anderson is back. Such was my immediate reaction to Mr. Anderson’s first wholly animated picture, the Roald Dahl adaptation, Fantastic Mr. Fox. For some, he never left but I found Fantastic Mr. Fox a breath of fresh air after a pair of aesthetically wonderful but thematically tepid films (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in 2004 and The Darjeeling Limited in 2007). Fantastic Mr. Fox was a reassurance that Anderson had not lost any of the flair, ebullience or quirky, dark humor so evident in his earlier classics, Rushmore & The Royal Tenenbaums. And so, I’m delighted to report, despite a languorous month-long wait to see it in limited release, my reaction to the deliriously whimsical Moonrise Kingdom is similarly enthusiastic.

Moonrise Kingdom sports the familiar Andersonian motif of runaway adolescents in some kind of love—essentially picking up where Richie & Margot Tenenbaum left off when they camped out in the African wing of the Public Archives, subsisting on crackers and root beer—this time on the gloomily picturesque and largely uninhabited New England island of New Penzance (yet another personal Neverland I daydream of being whisked away to). And in typical Wes Anderson fashion, family dysfunction is the root cause for the barely adolescent Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) & Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) to run off together. There’s a glimpse of their first meeting (Sam spies on Suzy in a backstage dressing room during a school production of Noye’s Fludde) and it’s not long before they become pen pals, sending communiqués back and forth across New Penzance in a clever and concisely edited montage that conveys volumes about each using only sentence fragments. Each brings the essentials for their preteen tryst: Sam, an orphaned Khaki Scout who goes AWOL, the survival gear and Suzy, more at home in Paris than New England, her ever-present binoculars, her cat, a collection of “borrowed” children’s novels, and her brother’s portable record player.

Their scenes are an idyllic slice of escapism from the harsh and mundane realities of growing up. The headliners in Moonrise Kingdom are the bitter and reluctant embodiment of those realities, as is typical of the romantic entanglement and societal dysfunction that is the Wes Anderson brand, and are the ones tasked with retrieving Sam and Suzy. Ed Norton’s Scout Master sequesters himself in his tent despondently tape recording the results of his troop’s search while chain-smoking and drinking brandy, a long panning shot—a wonderful hybrid between stageplay and French New Wave—is used to show the distance between the Counselors Bishop (Bill Murray & Frances McDormand) in the doll’s house cross section of their home, Bruce Willis’s Captain Sharp (New Penzance’s sole police officer) is a simple and lonely man who spends his time parked in the dark outside the Bishop’s lighthouse when not looking for Sam and Suzy, and Tilda Swinton as the all-business Social Services (that’s her name) is icy and curt and seen mostly through split screen. When they all collide in act three, a literal and figurative storm hits New Penzance, the likes of which has never been seen since. It’s easy to see why Sam and Suzy ran off.

These veteran thespians are more for support than the heart of what tale Moonrise Kingdom has to tell, similar to the legendary talents hired in the Harry Potter series. Despite the largely youth focused cast and runtime, Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson’s most mature work to date, due in large part to the frankness with which he portrays Sam and Suzy. There’s a refreshing honesty to the awkward, just pubescent sexuality between them and the innocence in their romantic stumblings is jarring not only for their blunt delivery but their juxtaposition against the supremely unhappy and selfish adults supposedly more together and responsible than the absconded, young lovers.

There’s a bit towards the end where Sam and Suzy approach the shystie Cousin Ben, Jason Schwartzmann in great cameo form, to marry them. They propose this while they’re casually chewing bubblegum. Moonrise Kingdom is full of this storybook whimsy but, occasionally, the runaway love story slows to a halt, such as when Sam and Suzy are forbidden to see each other again, Romeo & Juliet style, and it gets a bit lost towards the end in all the Noah’s Ark symbolism but it’s a testament to the magnetism between the well chosen first timers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward as much as anything else. Plus, the flurry of techniques from Anderson’s work in animation (an arrow flying off the bow, a strike of lightning) and lucious color palette (full of the late summer yellows, beiges, and greens of New Penzance) make it easy to forgive any momentary slights in what is surely another beloved addition to Wes Anderson’s charming oeuvre.