If anything, Wes Anderson is very consistent. His films all share his brisk pacing, deadpan humor, diorama creativity and color, and precise attention to detail. And they’re all good.
This is even though each of his nine films is wildly different and ambitious in ways unique to each project. He’s put his quirky, fantastical stamp on coming-of-age romances, family dysfunction dramas, children’s fables and French New Wave cinema. You could make a case that any of Anderson’s films is the “Most Wes Anderson” film. I wrote as much about his previous film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, which found him globe hoping, going to dark places and using his dioramas to examine legacy and loss. That’s all true even though his other films have these qualities in spades, in their own ways.
So where does that leave Isle of Dogs, his second stop-motion animated film following the wonderful Fantastic Mr. Fox? It feels like Anderson at his ugliest, dabbling in washed out horizons, muted colors and grizzly characters, though you can find parallels in his past films. He’s fully embracing his Japanese influences from Akira Kurosawa and kabuki dance, though eagle-eyed viewers must’ve known he’s a fan. And it also feels like his most grim movie, with an immensely percussive score lending gravitas and stakes to an otherwise pleasant story about dogs. You know where this is going.
Isle of Dogs is exactly like all of Anderson’s films and none of them. It dazzles with animation and moods that Anderson has never dabbled in before, and yet it feels at home with his best work.
There is however a noticeably different voice present in Isle of Dogs: co-writer Kunichi Nomura, a Japanese radio personality who acted in The Grand Budapest Hotel and now lends his voice to the evil Mayor Kobayashi. Nomura bestows an epic ancient legend to open Isle of Dogs, in which the cat-loving Kobayashi clan wages war against the population of dogs until a young boy leads the dogs to victory.
It sets a particularly grand stage for the film’s odyssey. After an outbreak of dog flu, Mayor Kobayashi has banished all dogs to Trash Island, including the guard dog Spots (Liev Schreiber) of his own stepson, Atari (Koyu Rankin). Atari travels to Trash Island and enlists the help of a pack of five dogs who set out to find the boy’s lost companion.
Anderson makes the bleak beautiful on Trash Island. The dogs will trek along barren wastelands amid a heap of gray trash, but their lanky shadows will project on the mountain of junk a mile high. The dogs themselves are wonderfully animated as well, with every strand of fur accounted for amid the stop motion. These puppets are made to look mangy and filthy, but also deeply expressive and menacing like when the heroes stare down a rival pack of dogs in a Western showdown to fight over scraps of garbage. Anderson stages these battles as chaotic dust clouds with limbs and fur flailing everywhere. It’s cartoonish and amusing in the way Fantastic Mr. Fox was, but the animosity feels harsher here given the tone set by Alexandre Desplat’s propulsive score.
Even the dialogue has a bittersweet tinge. “All the ones I like, they’re never in heat,” one of the dogs says as they admire a beautiful groomed show dog. The pack’s leader, Chief (Bryan Cranston), is revealed as a stray with a violent tendency. “I bite,” he warns, and for a movie about dogs, it’s profound in how it grapples with being a domesticized, servant house pet versus being loved and loving in return.
For how many thoughtful choices Anderson makes and how many times in Isle of Dogs he challenges the audience, he makes a rare oversight. A disclaimer early in the film explains that, in place of subtitles, an interpreter (Frances McDormand) will translate all Japanese voices, but all dog barks have been translated into English.
Isle of Dogs gets a lot of Japan right, but by supplanting the native language, it effectively turns Japan into a backdrop. It begs the question, why is this movie set here at all? What would it lose if it were set anywhere else? We’d lose the opportunity for Anderson to explore Kurosawa influences and other culture of course. But Japan itself doesn’t serve the story in a meaningful way.
This racial debate however is the sort of discussion you have when faced with a film as rich, surprising and ambitious as Isle of Dogs. This may be a fresh discussion, but it’s what we’ve come to expect from Anderson.
4 stars
very nice appreciation of this filmmaker’s work, we can only wish more people—let’s specify: than the usual clique of cinema insiders—would pick up on it (albeit the movie’s been sticking around awhile—occupying mall space by the skin of its teeth—so SOMEBODY’s obviously getting the message) * one small quibble though, about “turn[ing] japan into a backdrop”: fact is, the film doesn’t EXIST without japan, and some kind of “appropriation,” if that’s what it is, seems almost unavoidable * also: japan’s inevitably a “work in progress,” as are we all, whatever our “traditions” may be, and if anderson’s “appropriating” this kind of thing for purposes other than the usual ones, well, that’s what ALL the arts do, at least those that are still alive * so yes, it traffics in “stereotype” (my word: you might prefer something less invidious), but if it doesn’t do that it’s dead, culturally irrelevant * and what about miyazaki: appropriating stereotype in his own way, yet presumably off the hook because he’s one of the tribe? * optimistically, someday we’ll get past this “oppressive” double dealing (like, e.g., tarantino freely employing the likes of samuel l. jackson—talk about stereotypical provocations!—who [mostly] gets a pass, as authorized fellow traveler, because of his upfront support for antiracial politics and community), but as things stand right now, i’d call this echt robinson crusoe desert-island riff—pace the russian LOVELESS, my own erstwhile favorite—the “best” (as in most consistently—o well, let’s say DARINGLY—inventive … if sometimes at the expense of audience coherence) movie i’ve seen all year