Wes Anderson Royal Tenenbaums" was nominated for an Academy Award and ranked by an "Empire" poll as the 159th greatest film ever made. Anderson's next feature was "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (2004) about a Jacques Cousteau-esque documentary filmmaker played by Bill Murray. It serves as a classic example of Anderson's style, but its critical reception was less favorable than his previous films, and its box office did not match the heights of "The Royal Tenenbaums". In September 2006, Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen released a tongue-in-cheek "letter of intervention" for Anderson's artistic "malaise" following the disappointing commercial and
Henry Selick the Giant Peach", his live-action/stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic children's book. The innovative film received widespread critical acclaim ("Time" Magazine's Richard Schickel said it was even better than the book), and it won the top prize for an animated feature at the Annecy Film Festival in 1997, despite low box-office receipts. Selick's third feature was "Monkeybone", a live action/stop-motion adaptation of an underground comic. The film was a flop both commercially and critically. After developing stop-motion animation on Wes Anderson's feature "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou", Selick joined the Portland, Oregon-based animation studio LAIKA in mid-2004 as supervising