Music as a Character

In most films, the soundtrack supports the story. In Moonrise Kingdom, it practically is the story. Wes Anderson built the entire emotional architecture of the film around three pillars of music: Benjamin Britten’s orchestral and choral works, Alexandre Desplat’s original score, and a handful of pop songs dropped in at precisely the right moments.

The result is a soundtrack that moves between the grand and the intimate, the classical and the countrified, the instructional and the deeply romantic — just like the film itself.

Benjamin Britten: The Foundation

Benjamin Britten’s music isn’t background in Moonrise Kingdom. It’s woven into the plot, the themes, and the very structure of the film. Anderson chose Britten because the English composer spent much of his career writing music for and about young people — not condescending children’s music, but serious work that treated young performers and audiences as capable of real artistic engagement.

The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra

The film opens with this piece, composed by Britten in 1946 as an educational work designed to introduce children to the instruments of the orchestra. A narrator (in the film, it’s the Bishop children playing a record) names each section — woodwinds, brass, strings, percussion — as Britten puts each through its paces.

It’s a brilliant opening gambit. The Young Person’s Guide is about taking something complex and showing you its components, one by one. That’s exactly what Anderson does with the opening sequence of Moonrise Kingdom. As Britten’s narrator catalogues the orchestra, Anderson’s camera catalogues the Bishop household — room by room, child by child, the record player at the center spinning like the hub of a wheel.

The piece also establishes the film’s relationship with instruction and order. Britten is teaching. The Khaki Scouts are taught. The Bishop children are being raised. Everyone is following a guide. Sam and Suzy’s rebellion is, in part, a rebellion against guided experience — against being told what to listen for.

Noye’s Fludde

This is the piece that brings Sam and Suzy together. Britten’s 1958 church opera, based on a medieval mystery play about Noah’s flood, is performed by the children of New Penzance. Suzy plays a raven. Sam is in the audience in his scout uniform.

The choice is loaded with meaning. Noye’s Fludde is about a catastrophic flood that destroys the old world and allows a new one to begin — which is precisely the plot of Moonrise Kingdom. The storm that hits New Penzance in the third act is the film’s climactic flood, and Sam and Suzy are its Noah figures, preserving something essential through the destruction.

Britten wrote Noye’s Fludde to be performed by amateurs — children and community members, not professionals. It’s music that takes young performers seriously, giving them difficult, real work to do. Anderson clearly identified with this philosophy. His film takes its child characters just as seriously, never treating their emotions as lesser versions of adult feelings.

The rehearsal and performance scenes of Noye’s Fludde recur throughout the film, serving as structural anchors. The music swells as the narrative stakes rise. By the time the actual storm arrives, Britten’s flood music and Anderson’s flood narrative have become inseparable.

Other Britten Works

Several other Britten compositions appear throughout the film, including pieces from the Simple Symphony and A Ceremony of Carols. Each selection shares the same quality: music written with young people in mind that refuses to simplify itself for them. Anderson uses these pieces to underscore moments of childlike seriousness — Sam studying his maps, Suzy reading her books, the scouts executing their search operation with military gravity.

Alexandre Desplat’s Score

Desplat, who would go on to score The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, and Isle of Dogs for Anderson, composed an original score for Moonrise Kingdom that threads through the Britten selections like a complementary voice.

His main theme is built around a simple, repeating melodic figure — a few notes on plucked strings and woodwinds that sound like someone carefully stepping through the woods. It’s precise, delicate, and slightly melancholy. It captures Sam’s character perfectly: methodical, earnest, and alone.

The score expands as Sam and Suzy’s journey progresses. What begins as a solo voice becomes a duet, then a small ensemble. The orchestration grows warmer as their relationship deepens, adding gentle brass and sustained strings. It’s one of the more subtle and effective uses of a score tracking emotional development — you feel the relationship growing even before you consciously register the musical change.

Desplat also composed the music for the narrator’s weather updates — those dry, slightly ominous passages where Bob Balaban’s character addresses the camera directly. These cues are clipped, factual, and foreboding, treating the incoming storm as a ticking clock.

The score earned Desplat a BAFTA nomination and cemented his partnership with Anderson as one of the most productive director-composer collaborations in contemporary cinema.

Hank Williams: Heartbreak Country

Two Hank Williams recordings appear on the soundtrack: “Kaw-Liga” and “Long Gone Lonesome Blues.” Both are, characteristically for Williams, about loneliness and unfulfilled longing — a wooden Indian who can’t love the wooden maiden across the road, a man so blue he might as well jump in the river.

Anderson uses Williams as the sound of the adult world’s romantic failures. Captain Sharp, alone in his one-room house, is a Hank Williams character. Walt Bishop, silently watching his marriage dissolve, could be the subject of any number of Williams songs. The country music provides a counterpoint to the Britten — where Britten’s music is structured, communal, and forward-looking, Williams is solitary, plain-spoken, and resigned.

There’s something perfect about Williams’ voice in this context. It’s the most unadorned, emotionally direct sound in the film. No orchestration, no complexity, just a man and a guitar telling you exactly how bad it feels. In a film full of careful compositions and symmetrical frames, Williams cuts through like a voice from a different, less controlled world.

Françoise Hardy: “Le Temps de l’Amour”

This is the song. The one everyone remembers.

When Sam and Suzy reach their cove, Suzy puts a record on her portable player. Françoise Hardy’s voice fills the air — French yé-yé pop, breathy and romantic, singing about the time of love. Sam and Suzy dance on the beach in their underwear, awkward and sincere and completely committed. He dips her. She lets him. The ocean is behind them.

“Le Temps de l’Amour” works so well here because it’s a teenager’s idea of sophistication. It’s French. It’s on vinyl. It’s from Suzy’s personal collection, chosen with the same care she brings to selecting her stolen library books. Playing this record on a beach is her way of setting a scene — of turning a sandy inlet into the romantic location she’s read about in her novels.

Hardy recorded the song in 1962, making it contemporary to the film’s 1965 setting. It has the slightly naive glamour of early ’60s pop — a sound that believes in love without irony. For two twelve-year-olds who have never been in love before, it’s the perfect soundtrack. They don’t need something knowing or experienced. They need exactly what Hardy gives them: simple, beautiful conviction that right now is the time and this is the place.

The scene would be a classic with any number of songs. With this one, it becomes indelible.

The Record Player as Motif

Music in Moonrise Kingdom is almost always diegetic — it exists within the world of the film, played on actual devices by actual characters. The Bishop children listen to Britten on a portable record player. Suzy carries her own player to the cove. The church performance of Noye’s Fludde is a live event the characters attend.

The record player is the key object here. It’s a machine that requires intention — you choose a record, place the needle, commit to listening. In a film about characters who are constantly being told what to do and where to go, the act of choosing your own music is a small but real act of autonomy.

Suzy’s portable player is one of the items she packs for her escape, alongside books, binoculars, and her kitten — the items she packs for her escape. She prioritizes it alongside survival essentials, because for her it is essential. Music isn’t entertainment. It’s world-building. When she plays Hardy on the beach, she’s not just providing atmosphere — she’s declaring what kind of moment this is going to be.

Sam, notably, doesn’t bring music. He brings tools, maps, and provisions. Suzy brings the interior life — the books, the records, the emotional vocabulary. Their partnership works because they supply what the other lacks. He builds the campsite. She makes it mean something.

How the Music Tells the Story

Strip away the dialogue and the performances, and you could follow the emotional arc of Moonrise Kingdom through its soundtrack alone.

Britten’s instructional piece opens the film: order, structure, a guided tour. The score introduces Sam’s theme: solitary, precise, a little sad. Williams underscores the adults’ loneliness. Britten’s flood music builds as the stakes rise. Hardy’s pop song marks the emotional peak — two people finding each other. The score warms and expands. Then the storm hits, Britten’s Noye’s Fludde crashes in, and everything converges in a flood of sound and water and feeling.

When it’s over, the score returns — quieter now, gentler. Sam paints. The record player spins. Something has been preserved.

Anderson is often praised for his visual style, and rightly so. But Moonrise Kingdom makes an argument that he’s equally a musical filmmaker — someone who hears a story as much as he sees it, and who trusts music to carry the weight of emotion that images alone can’t bear.