Em um fascinante artigo para Slate , Forrest Wickman explica que este filme (como os outros de Anderson antes disso, notavelmente Rushmore e Bottle Rocket ) foi influenciado pelo amor de Anderson por Peanuts e o trabalho do diretor do Peanuts , Bill Melendez. (O cachorro no filme é chamado de Snoopy.) Você está em um mundo de fantasia desde o começo, mas talvez você só não perceba isso até a cena do relâmpago. De Reino do Nascer da Lua , Wickman diz:
Some of its sequences are remarkably cartoonish. When one character is struck by lightning, he looks more like he was hit by Acme dynamite: His face is blackened with soot, and he seems otherwise unharmed. And the scouts aren’t Boy Scouts, they’re Khaki Scouts, a fictional takeoff that’s reminiscent of Snoopy’s Beagle Scouts. Anderson has spoken often of his fondness for “self-contained worlds,” a penchant he says comes from Peanuts—and while all of Anderson’s worlds feel self-contained, that’s never more true than here, in which all the action literally takes place on a (fictional) island. The magic of self-contained worlds is also one of the central themes of the film: At the end of the movie we learn that Moonrise Kingdom takes its name from Sam and Suzy’s own secret place, a cove where they try to make a life of their own away from troubles back home.
It’s there that Moonrise’s hero bonds with his own Little Red-Haired Girl: Suzy. Suzy’s outfit, complete with pink dress, white collar, and, in some scenes, a pink cape, is almost identical to that of the Little Red-Haired Girl. Sam’s outfit may not mimic Charlie Brown’s as neatly, but he does wear a lot of yellow—and, as The Star-Ledger’s Stephen Whitty pointed out, at one point he even says, “Rats!”
Wickman retira o trabalho do crítico de cinema Matt Zoller Seitz, que estudou o trabalho de Anderson e criou um comentário em vídeo chamado" The Substance of Style - Parte 1 "sobre o trabalho de Anderson.