by Alex Billington
May 4, 2026
Source: YouTube
“These movies are funny to look at.” This is for all the movie geeks! The acclaimed video essay duo known as “Every Frame a Painting” (run by Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou) has launched their latest video on YT. This one is a promotional collaboration with Criterion taking a meticulous look at one of Wes Anderson’s most idiosyncratic films – Isle of Dogs. The 10 minute video essay takes a closer look at the visual comedy within Anderson’s 2018 stop-motion animated movie Isle of Dogs, his animation follow-up to the beloved Fantastic Mr. Fox. They cover many of the techniques & visual gags that he uses including: things entering frame, things leaving frame, size discrepancies, fun backgrounds, visual parodies, comic violence, too much headroom, too little headroom, split screens, physical comedy, reactions to camera, snap zoom, geometry, slapstick, deep focus composition, and much more. It’s also just a fresh and fun and entertaining breakdown of the creativity & cinematic brilliance on display in the movie (and in all of Wes Anderson’s movies). Enjoy.
Here’s the brief intro via YouTube: “A video essay by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou, the duo behind Every Frame a Painting, exploring how Wes Anderson’s career-long experiments with visual humor reach new heights in his 2018 animated film, Isle of Dogs. The ten Wes Anderson films featured here are available as individual releases from Criterion and together in our recent collector’s set dedicated to the director, The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years.” This is a collab to promote that glorious Criterion box set.” The video essay is made by filmmakers Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou. You can follow Zhou on Twitter @tonyszhou – they originally created the YouTube channel called Every Frame a Painting (watch more) described as “a series of video essays about film form, made from April 2014 to September 2016.” Last year they made a short film called The Second (view the teaser here) along with a few new video essays. Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs movies initially debuted in 2018 and is available on Criterion 4K Blu-ray now.
