Wes Anderson has spent the last twenty years honing his
signature visual style into such a highly refined and recognizable level that
he’s almost become a genre of his own. If you’ve ever seen one of his movies,
then you pretty much know what to expect: desaturated pastel colors, symmetrical
framing packed with a thousand little detail, wide shots, long takes,
characters that talk like a simulacrum of whatever their defining trait is, family
drama where a well-off white guy struggles with ennui and an estranged parental
figure, and an appearance from Bill Murray. All those are present and accounted
for in Isle of Dogs, his first
animated feature since Fantastic Mr. Fox
(which is not just my favorite Wes Anderson film, but also one of my favorite
films period), which I’m amazed by since his style is so perfectly suited for
animation that I’m surprised that he doesn’t do it more often. It makes sense
since he favors stop-motion, which a painstakingly long process, but also helps
to makes the dollhouse artifice of his aesthetic all the more apparent.
Our story takes place in an alternate version of Japan,
where the dog population has exploded, and a deadly canine disease has spread.
To combat this epidemic, Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura) orders all dogs
exiled from the city of Megasaki and quarantined on a nearby garbage island. Six
months later, his nephew Atari (Koyu Rankin) flies a makeshift plane to the
island to find his dog Spots (Liev Schreiber). After he crashes, he’s rescued
by a pack of alpha dogs; Chief (Bryan Cranston), Rex (Edward Norton), Duke
(Jeff Goldblum), Boss (Bill Murray), and King (Bob Balaban), who agree to help the
boy. Back on the mainland, the government is dealing with a
resistance group lead by a foreign exchange student (Greta Gerwig), who
discovered that they tried to sabotage a group of scientists who found a cure
for the disease.
I feel like Isle of
Dogs was a challenge Wes Anderson set up for himself to see if he could
maintain his style in a setting that’s completely antithetical to it, IE how do
I make a Wes Anderson movie out of garbage? And the answer is he turns it into
the Wes Anderson version of a dystopian wasteland, complete with its own
hazardous death trap areas and even a tribe of supposed cannibal dogs. Although
he keeps things orderly and dioramic, everything is still scruffy, scrappy and
unkempt, with the little movements left in by the hands of the puppeteers
giving it an extra layer of realness. (On a side note, I think it’s great that
we got two
stop-motion animation films this year.) Beyond that, I also love that whenever
they show action on a monitor, it’s rendered in 2D animation that resembles
Japanese woodblock art.
Surprisingly enough, this might be Wes Anderson’s darkest
and most overtly political film to date. He’s dabbled with this before in The Grand Budapest Hotel, but here the
themes are a bit more explicit, dealing with subjects like abandonment, animal
cruelty, authoritarianism, immigration, murder, genocide, and there a few brief
graphic scenes. During a scuffle in the first ten minutes, a dog gets its ear
torn off amidst the flailing limbs in a down dust cloud. When Atari crashes his
plane, he gets a bolt stuck in his head and it stays there for a good chunk of
the movie. There’s even highly fascinating shot of a chef making sushi done in
squirm inducing detail. But even with all the violence going on, it’s played
off in a very cartoonish, Andersonian manner. There’s a moment where the dogs
are trapped in an incinerator, and their escape is framed like the scene in Modern Times
where Charlie Chaplin gets stuck in the gears of the machine. And when they meet the tribe of cannibal
dogs, the reveal of where that rumor came from becomes an unexpected
tearjerker moment. Even though this could be classified as a family movie, that
PG-13 rating is there for a reason. It’s a very different beast from Fantastic Mr. Fox.
The voice acting is also superb. Anderson is known for
recycling actors, and here he uses a few of his regulars including Bill Murray
(of course, it wouldn’t be a Wes Anderson film without him), Edward Norton, Bob
Balaban, Jeff Goldblum, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, F. Murray Abraham and
Harvey Keitel, but also brings in a few new additions to the stable like Bryan
Cranston, Scarlet Johansson, Liev Schreiber, Greta Gerwig and Ken Watanabe.
Everyone does an outstanding job, but it’s Cranston as Chief, the pessimistic
stray who’s the self-appointed leader in a democratic pack who’s the constant
naysayer in their votes. He gets most of the heavy lifting in the character
development department, but the rest of the pack still have a field day
spouting out the script’s witty banter.
Speaking of which, there’s a gimmick where the dog’s barks
are all translated into English, but the human characters are mostly speaking
in un-subtitled Japanese, aside from the occasional translator. There’s a bit of controversy surrounding this
decision as some took it as unintentionally othering the Japanese characters
since we understand the dogs (the good guys) but not the humans (mostly bad
guys), and it’s not helped that Greta Gerwig’s character, one of the only English-speaking
humans in the movie, could be seen as a “white savior”, or that Anderson kind of
did the whole cultural pastiche thing with India in The Darjeeling Limited to mixed results. I think it works in this
case because, even though you can’t understand what most of the humans are saying,
you still get the gist of what’s going on, which is a real testament to the
animator’s abilities as storytellers. The film even works in a few nods to
Japanese culture from sumo wrestling to kabuki theater, and some shots and
compositions are reminiscent of their cinematic greats like Yasujiro Ozu and Akira
Kurosawa. (One scene even cribs the score from Seven Samurai.) Whether it’s appreciation or appropriation is up to
you, but I think it was respectable enough.
Bottom line, Isle of
Dogs is another victory for the Wes Anderson oeuvre. The animation is spectacular,
the themes are timely, and it alternates between humorous and heart-wrenching
without a hitch. If you’re an Anderson fan, none of what I just said should
come as a surprise to you. For everyone else, it’s well worth checking out.
9/10, Full Price
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