#The matte book palette series

#The matte book palette series

Two of the biggest influences on A Series of Unfortunate Events were A Little Princess and Sleepy Hollow, both films that operate on the thin line between dreams and reality. A Series of Unfortunate Events may suffer from trying to cram too much material into too short a runtime, but there’s no denying the technical prowess of Silberling and his team. It’s a fantastic example of someone weaponizing the constraints placed upon them to their advantage, with Silberling silencing any doubts that this was just an easy money grab to cash in on a successful line of books. The result is one of the most visually arresting children’s films ever made, with a level of care put into its cinematography and production design that is unparalleled for films of its nature. Rather than compressing three books into two hours and then calling it a day, Silberling opted to use the original Snicket books as a palette from which to paint a beautiful morose canvas.

Of course, he could have just carried on with a straightforward adaptation anyway, its target audience probably not being the most clued in to a sloppily written script, but Silberling had something more creative in mind. Due to the very nature of being a film, it would have been impossible to compress three books worth of story into a two-hour runtime without sacrificing the idiosyncratic writing that made them such a hit, something director Brad Silberling appears to have realized. Following the mysterious death of their parents, the Baudelaire orphans consisting of Violet ( Emily Browning), Klaus ( Liam Aiken), and Sunny ( Kara and Shelby Hoffman) find themselves shepherded from one guardian to the next, all the while trying to avoid the clutches of the nefarious Count Olaf ( Jim Carrey) and his schemes to obtain their family fortune.

RELATED: Why Netflix's 'A Series of Unfortunate Events' Deserves Another Lookĭespite being forced to condense much of the source material to keep things within a reasonable runtime, the film still largely adheres to the plot of the first three novels.