Still via Youtube

By now you’ve undoubtedly been inundated with news of Wes Anderson’s new film, Isle of Dogs, in which a bunch of stop motion canines are exiled to a Japanese trash island. Both beautiful and problematic, Anderson’s film is racking up both acclaim for its incredible production design, and column inches for the fact that none of the Japanese characters are comprehensible, relegated to a weird otherness. Today’s drama is even better however — does Wes actually hate dogs? The New Yorker seems to think so, detailing Snoopy’s death in Moonrise Kingdom, the fate of the various hounds in The Fantastic Mr Fox, and all the dogs in Anderson’s many other movies. What exactly does he have against our four legged friends exactly? We can only imagine it’s something to do with the strange way Anderson approaches emotion in general — at a stylized remove.



Our favorite examination comes courtesy of Little White Lies, a video essay by Luis Azevedo narrated from the perspective of a dog, aka canis lupis familiaris (all moving image should be narrated from an animal’s point of view from this point onwards, not just that exceptional episode of HBO’s High Maintenance). They do a deep dive on “The Tragedy of Buckley,” the faithful beagle in The Royal Tenenbaums. Buckley, you might remember, is killed when Eli Cash, as played by Owen Wilson, crashes his car into the front of the house while high on mescaline. “For him our suffering has no meaning outside of a metaphorical context,” the video concludes dolefully. Watch, and weep.