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
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou because they are central to the storyline, make "The Life Aquatic" similar in some ways to "Respiro". Both films set out a "Mediterranean state of being" where "having left the security of land, the characters in both films are suddenly confronted with the precarious nature of human existence, as the films that depict them tackle the challenges of representing the submarine world." The soundtrack to "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" contains a style typical of other Wes Anderson films. Mark Mothersbaugh, a member of Devo, composed the score, as he has for many of Anderson's other films. The film