The Visual Comedy of ISLE OF DOGS | Criterion x Every Frame a Painting

0:05 For the past three decades,

0:07 Wes Anderson has left a distinctive fingerprint in American comedy.

0:12 With his penchant for artificial worlds,

0:15 deadpan performances, literary devices, and snappy narration.

0:19 …course of that eventful evening.

0:22 Shall I carry on?

0:23 But there’s something else.

0:25 These movies are funny to look at.

0:28 Over the years, Anderson has experimented more and more with visual comedy.

0:32 And none of this is more apparent than in Isle of Dogs.

0:39 For the sake of brevity,

0:40 we’ll define visual comedy as humor that is mainly conveyed through images.

0:45 You have to look at it to get it.

0:47 For example: This is in direct contrast to verbal comedy,

1:13 which is mainly conveyed through dialogue.

1:15 -Is he dead?

1:15 -He looks dead.

1:16 I have a question.

1:17 Are we eating him or is this a rescue?

1:19 We don’t know yet.

1:20 Nobody’s eating the Little Pilot.

1:22 And when it comes to visual comedy,

1:23 Isle of Dogs is Anderson’s most experimental film yet.

1:31 Wes Anderson is known for a particular style.

1:33 We don’t have time to go into all of it.

1:35 So we’ll paraphrase the great David Bordwell.

1:39 First, he shoots planimetric frames.

1:42 That’s where the background is perpendicular

1:44 to the camera and the characters are

1:45 usually placed as if they’re in a class photo or a mug shot.

1:49 The effect is a bit like watching a stage play or a diorama.

1:53 As a result, Anderson’s worlds have very visible

1:56 geometry and the characters move in straight lines, which is part of the humor.

2:01 To get from one shot to the next,

2:02 Anderson uses a technique that Bordwell calls compass point.

2:06 Basically, the camera can cut 90 degrees or 180, straight in or out.

2:16 And of course, all of the above can be accomplished with a whip pan.

2:21 On top of that, the camera can only move along one axis at a time.

2:25 So it can dolly one way, but then it has to stop before changing direction.

2:31 Now that we’ve established the rules of Anderson’s camera,

2:34 how does he use these parameters to his advantage?

2:37 Get ready to jump.

2:39 Atari… We’ll jump into this scene.

2:41 Yoko Ono is drinking at a bar.

2:43 The camera then jumps backwards to reveal

2:45 the bartender and a wide view of the room,

2:47 which is used for Tracy’s dramatic entrance.

2:50 We then cut 180 degrees for this close-up.

2:53 Once she starts speaking to Yoko Ono… Tracy Walker, Megasaki Senior High.

2:58 …the camera whips 90 degrees.

3:00 Anderson stages most of the scene in a planimetric two-shot.

3:03 This allows him to keep our attention centered while using the edges

3:06 of the frame to let objects exit and enter as needed.

3:10 The great thing about this sequence is that every shot has a distinct purpose,

3:14 and the staging allows Anderson to use the entire frame for comic effect.

3:18 Pull yourself together and act like a scientist!

3:21 But with such a well-defined style,

3:24 the next question is, how can he build variation?

3:30 Well, for one thing, he can subdivide the frame.

3:33 He achieves this effect photographically using deep-focus compositions.

3:37 This shot allows us to see Rex’s

3:39 dialogue and the other dog’s reactions without cutting.

3:42 I don’t think I can stomach any more of this garbage.

3:44 -Exact same here.

3:45 -Words out of my mouth.

3:47 This staging of figures is influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s 1960s films.

3:51 The foreground face plays beautifully against the background figures.

3:55 Similarly, there are numerous shots where the bottom of frame is a wide,

3:58 while the top is a close-up.

4:02 The film also makes extensive use of monitors and TV screens within frame,

4:06 which allows Anderson to play one area of the image against another.

4:10 In Fantastic Mr.

4:10 Fox, we saw an early experiment of this when

4:13 the heist from Bunce was shown only in security footage.

4:19 Isle of Dogs has expanded on that, introducing

4:22 entire action sequences that are depicted via security cam.

4:30 And of course, there is the literal subdivision of frame: the split screen.

4:35 The end result is yet another tool added to Anderson’s arsenal,

4:38 and a way for him to push his style within the restraints he’s given himself.

4:42 Now he can stage elaborate gags literally side by side.

4:55 The second major experiment of Isle of Dogs is in terms of artifice.

5:02 All filmmaking is an illusion.

5:04 And even before he worked in animation,

5:06 Anderson was building artificial constructed worlds.

5:09 But Fantastic Mr.

5:10 Fox was a fulcrum point.

5:17 There were ideas he had tried in live-action

5:20 that animation allowed him to explore even further.

5:25 Because animation is not real,

5:27 the audience has already suspended their disbelief

5:29 further than they would in a live-action film.

5:32 Which means you can get away with things that make no logical sense.

5:37 After he worked in animation,

5:38 we can see Anderson pushing believability further in his live-action work.

5:46 By emphasizing the artifice,

5:47 he can get away with humor that would not work in a more realistic film.

5:54 But it’s a two-way street.

5:57 In Isle of Dogs, Anderson has brought aspects of other mediums into stop-motion.

6:01 The film employs devices from theater,

6:03 like dramatic lighting shifts and on-stage background changes,

6:08 and techniques from live-action filmmaking.

6:10 Unlike other forms of animation, stop-motion exists in the physical world,

6:14 which means the lights, cameras, puppets, and sets are all real objects.

6:19 The film even uses other types of animation.

6:22 For instance, 2D is used to differentiate any moment on a screen.

6:26 He will be rescued promptly, returned to safety,

6:28 and grounded for the duration of his childhood year.

6:31 By stacking all these different mediums on top of each other,

6:34 Isle of Dogs moves further from realism and towards something else: abstraction.

6:42 And abstraction helps him make things funnier, particularly with violence.

6:48 In his earlier films,

6:49 violence is often shown in hand-held, shaky, slightly awkward framing.

7:00 But Fantastic Mr.

7:01 Fox reduced the violence to quick flashes.

7:11 And you can see how that choice directly influenced his next live-action film.

7:20 By Isle of Dogs, the violence became clouds of cotton balls and limbs.

7:24 When the characters stopped fighting, they froze in place,

7:28 a trend that was further expanded in The French Dispatch.

7:31 By abstracting, Anderson is able to imply some pretty violent actions,

7:36 but the humor comes from the images playing

7:38 at right angles to the text of the scene.

7:43 Which brings us to rhythm.

7:45 Visual comedy is hard to describe in words.

7:47 That’s why we often draw the jokes on paper first.

7:51 Max?

7:52 Care to try it?

7:56 I’m sorry, did someone say my name?

7:58 Anderson had always storyboarded his films until Fantastic Mr.

8:01 Fox, when he started using animatics, which are storyboards timed out.

8:06 [Bean] I don’t know.

8:07 Two, I guess.

8:08 [Mrs.

8:09 Bean] You drank three yesterday, though.

8:10 Alright, take three.

8:15 Animatics opened him up to more ambitious visual

8:18 humor because he could design the rhythm in advance.

8:21 Notice the timing of the people passing through frame.

8:25 With all of this in mind,

8:26 let’s take a look at the sushi-poisoning sequence from Isle of Dogs.

8:34 First, it’s deliberately artificial.

8:36 It is timed so elaborately and precisely that the rhythm itself becomes funny.

8:41 Second, the actual violence is never shown.

8:44 We only see an implication and the end result.

8:48 Third, it brings in elements from another medium.

8:51 The hotel operates like a theatrical set.

8:53 When Watanabe appears, the lights change so we can see inside.

8:57 Sequences like this are enjoyable in Anderson’s

8:59 work because we know they’re not real.

9:02 By taking this plot point and pushing it to such extreme artifice,

9:06 he’s disguising tragedy with humor.

9:15 Visual comedy is one of our oldest genres, and has always been a vehicle

9:19 for filmmakers to express their anxieties and fears,

9:22 whether that was Charlie Chaplin and fascism,

9:26 Jacques Tati and modernity, or Terry Gilliam and bureaucracy.

9:31 With Isle of Dogs, Anderson is following

9:33 in that tradition of exploring dark subject matter through comedy.

9:36 Upon his release from Megasaki General, Atari,

9:39 who suffered the loss of his right kidney…

9:41 Wes Anderson’s films are about some pretty tragic things.

9:44 There’s family trauma, grief, emotional baggage, murder, war.

9:50 But Isle of Dogs might be his darkest film yet.

9:54 It’s about a leader who targets a specific group, demonizes them,

9:58 exiles them to a separate location, and then plans their demise.

10:01 The only people willing to stop him are not ordinary folks who largely agree,

10:06 but rather scientists, young protesters, and a lonely orphan.

10:10 The press mostly looks on.

10:13 What shocks the ordinary people into realizing

10:15 what they’ve done is a demonstration

10:17 of how much dogs mean to them by a child reciting a haiku.

10:27 This is not funny at all.

10:30 And yet the film looks very funny, which is, arguably, the point.