Those who had not followed Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina (guilty) were surprised to discover a much more theatrical, fantasy-inspired project than what you might have anticipated. Now that the cat’s out of its bag — or, now that people noticed this cat was never in a bag — the team at Focus Features have decided to play up its convention-shunning nature with two items of varying length and exposure.

The first of these is a six-minute clip — featuring Keira Knightley, Jude Law, and Aaron Johnson — while the second, from EW, features the main cast and Joe Wright stating about their intentions for film. You can only watch the latter there, but the former is readily available.

See the clip below (via ThePlaylist):

I have to say: That’s not really doing anything for yours truly. A shame, too, because I love the idea behind Wright‘s approach, craziness and potential to fail entirely notwithstanding. If you skipped ahead, it’s pretty well established when he introduced the clip by saying “just as the Russian aristocracy in the 19th century could be described as ‘living upon a stage,’ our story unfolds in a dilapidated theater.”

But does this look much different from a typical period piece? While I know (I know) it’s only about 1/20th of the completed film — and that it’s also possible Focus didn’t want to release anything too revealing, if only to preserve the element of surprise — it only feels “stage-y” in the most traditional, negative sense of the term. When Knightley asks, in the EW featurette, what “the point [is] in doing a safe adaptation,” I’d really like to know the answer myself.

Kelly Macdonald, Olivia Williams, Ruth Wilson, and Holliday Grainger also star in Anna Karenina, which will open in the U.K. on September 7th and in the U.S. on November 9th.

Is this first clip sufficient evidence that Karenina will set itself apart from your typical literary adaptation?