In a fascinating article for Slate, Forrest Wickman explains that this film (like others of Anderson's before this, notably Rushmore and Bottle Rocket) was influenced by Anderson's love of Peanuts and the work of Peanuts director Bill Melendez. (The dog in the film is even named Snoopy.) You are in a fantasy world from the beginning, but perhaps you just don't realize it until the lightning scene. Of Moonrise Kingdom, Wickman says:
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 draws from the work of film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, who has studied Anderson's work and has created a video commentary called "The Substance of Style - Part 1" about Anderson's work.
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