I'm familiar with Wes Anderson's well-known, and highly-appreciated style. His filmography spans across several unique titles all very much distinct, even with a cast we've seen before in very different roles.
The Royal Tenenbaums was released back in 2001, making it his third full-length feature film, just three years after the success of Rushmore, and three years before the not-so-well perceived The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. While it would still take years for Wes Anderson to become a much more recognisable name among film fanatics, these earlier works displayed a certainty of the type of quality of what is next to come from the director and often co-writer. Throughout the years, Wes Anderson's name would quickly be connected to a more artistic vision in filmmaking; a style that is often referred to as dated and far more simplified.
The Royal Tenenbaums contains those early elements of unique creativity. Featuring a similar narrative structure to Rushmore, the film focuses on the everyday tragedies of a not-so-normal family; each member an individual plagued by their own insecurities as a result of a mutually-shared troublesome upbringing. These characters are broken, and the narrative flourishes in their quick, unexpected, but well-accepted reunification. Their lives nothing alike in their current state, but they're capable of connecting through the fact that they find solace in their pasts together.
The narrative at large in Wes Anderson films is never hidden, nor is it drastically evident. At best, these stories focus on people; their struggles to get through each day without self-loathing as a result of missed opportunity and unavoidable mental health. These are characters that can be found in any society, although in the case of Wes Anderson films, they're mildly successful in some type of field -- now struggling to keep up the motivation, using family and friends as an escape into their pasts -- and that's what makes The Royal Tenenbaums function successfully. To remove the characters would result in almost no story, no 'from A to B' objective; after all, we're simply witnessing a chapter of their lives. The film ends once that chapter ends.
