The video features Jarvis Cocker as Tip-Top, taking us on a journey through Ennui-sur-Blasé. Along the way we meet the characters of the film and catch glimpses of the plot. We watch as Tip-Top cheerfully uses a floating corpse in a canal as a stepping stone, or dances past Tilda Swinton observing some elderly French gentlemen play pétanque. We climb up and up through the town with the boulangerie delivery vans in a way that seems to move through storeys without ever breaking the shot.

As the world waited for ‘The French Dispatch’, Wes Anderson asked Jarvis Cocker if he would cover one of his favourite songs, a mournful 1965 French hit called Aline, by the late, great Christophe, who inspired the character of Tip-Top. Wes once had a run-in with Christophe himself. “The way I’ve heard it,” Jarvis explains, “[Wes] first heard the song when he was at a dinner in Paris and was sat next to this guy he didn’t know...then at some point the guy was called away and played that song at a piano...it was Christophe himself.”

As the film is made in homage to The New Yorker, the artist’s style needed to possess a faint whiff of the magazine’s aesthetic values. So the illustrator Javi Aznarez was brought on board to help bring Wes Anderson’s cinematic version of one of the world’s most influential magazines to life.

Javi Aznarez the illustrator used a hand-drawn process to create this animation music video, which was used for the film’s titles. The animation’s style is inspired by the aesthetics of The New Yorker magazine on which the fictional ‘ The French Dispatch’ is based. The first-ever Wes Anderson-directed music video, it took Wes, Javi and seven other people eight months to complete. Aznarez did the full layout: all of the backgrounds, all of the character design, but then for Tip-Top himself, he drew dozens and dozens of faces, movements and expressions. For the way that Tip-Top dances and moves, using references of Jarvis himself in different videos and concerts. As lockdown dictated that the team weren’t able to draw Jarvis dancing from life, they relied on head animator Arnau Solà to send videos of himself walking upstairs sideways, or contorting his body into different positions for them to work with.