The Visual Comedy of Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs

I’m gonna call it: Every Frame a Painting, my all-time favorite YouTube channel, is back. Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos stopped producing their fantastic video essays back in 2017 and while they have popped up here and there since then, they’ve mostly stuck to their retirement.

But for the past few months, the duo have been releasing video essays produced in partnership with Criterion: Night of the Living Dead: Limitations into Virtues, The Blade (1995): The Edges of Wuxia, and just yesterday, The Visual Comedy of Isle of Dogs (embedded above).

For the past three decades, Wes Anderson has left a distinctive fingerprint in American comedy, with his penchant for artificial worlds, deadpan performances, literary devices, and snappy narration. But there’s something else. These movies are funny to look at. Over the years, Anderson has experimented more and more with visual comedy. And none of this is more apparent than in Isle of Dogs.

It looks like they’re doing about one video a month. I hope they keep it up…I love their videos.

(Ok, maybe don’t read this bit until you’ve watched the Isle of Dogs video, but did you detect that Zhou’s narration seems to be synced to the mouth movements of the characters in the clips he’s talking over? Such a great little detail of visual comedy…I clapped my hands in glee like a toddler when I noticed.)

• film school
• Isle of Dogs
• movies
• Taylor Ramos
• Tony Zhou
• video
• Wes Anderson