Isle of Dogs
Directed by: Wes Anderson
Written by: Wes Anderson & Jason Schwartzman & Roman Coppola and Kunichi Nomura
Voices by: Bryan Cranston, Koyu Rankin, Edward Norton, Bob Balaban, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Kunichi Nomura, Akira Takyama, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand, Akira Ito, Scarlett Johansson, Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Yoko Ono, Tilda Swinton, Ken Watanabe, Fisher Stevens, Liev Schreiber, Courtney B. Vance
Animation/Adventure/Comedy - 101 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 23 Mar 2018
Written by: Wes Anderson & Jason Schwartzman & Roman Coppola and Kunichi Nomura
Voices by: Bryan Cranston, Koyu Rankin, Edward Norton, Bob Balaban, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Kunichi Nomura, Akira Takyama, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand, Akira Ito, Scarlett Johansson, Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Yoko Ono, Tilda Swinton, Ken Watanabe, Fisher Stevens, Liev Schreiber, Courtney B. Vance
Animation/Adventure/Comedy - 101 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 23 Mar 2018
Some may say I am biased in favor of Wes Anderson films, but I say he habitually makes outstanding movies. Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, and The Grand Budapest Hotel are all top shelf experiences. He doesn’t hit a home run every time out, looking at you Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Darjeeling Limited, but I’ll eagerly partake of the occasional Anderson misfire; they are still full of whimsy and deadpan. Returning to stop-motion animation for a second time, a rare medium to attempt even once, Anderson creates a fantastic locale we’ve never seen, a desperate canine situation, and charts man’s instinct to bond with his best friend, a dog.
It’s not the idea of a movie about dogs abandoned on a garbage dump making the Anderson faithful drool at the site of the movie poster; it’s the written by section - “Screenplay by Wes Anderson; Story by Jason Schwartzman, Roman Coppola, Wes Anderson, and Kunichi Nomura.” Yes, please. It’s hard to imagine too many other names which inspire such gleeful hope in particular cinematic sub-sections; imagine Tarantino, McDonagh, and del Toro working together and then maybe you have a decent comparison. Stop-motion animation embraces a certain old school nostalgia and what contemporary director exemplifies old school nostalgia more than Wes Anderson?
It’s not the idea of a movie about dogs abandoned on a garbage dump making the Anderson faithful drool at the site of the movie poster; it’s the written by section - “Screenplay by Wes Anderson; Story by Jason Schwartzman, Roman Coppola, Wes Anderson, and Kunichi Nomura.” Yes, please. It’s hard to imagine too many other names which inspire such gleeful hope in particular cinematic sub-sections; imagine Tarantino, McDonagh, and del Toro working together and then maybe you have a decent comparison. Stop-motion animation embraces a certain old school nostalgia and what contemporary director exemplifies old school nostalgia more than Wes Anderson?
Anderson and company create a fantasy version of Japan 20 years in the future. Megasaki City is akin to any Japanese megalopolis, but now, it is over-crowded by diseased dogs. The city’s dogs, both stray and domesticated, have escalating cases of snout flu, an affliction involving coughing bouts, vomiting, and what appears to be canine pink eye. Inventing the politics of this fictional city, Anderson settles on an imposing Citizen Kane-type demagogue, Mayor Kobayashi (Nomura). Anderson wrote the script before our most recent presidential election, but now, Kobayashi’s style and ideological demeanor turn out to be quite right for our moment in time. Mayor Kobayashi represents an impressive lineage of cat-loving strongmen. Being as corrupt and all-powerful as he is, Kobayashi finds it quite easy to sell his plan to exile all dogs to Trash Island, even his family’s own dog, Spots (Liev Schreiber).
The Mayor’s adopted son, Atari (Koyu Rankin), flies to the island in a junior aircraft to search for his beloved bodyguard dog. The main story kicks off from there as Atari meets a group of dogs who help him search for Spots. The dogs, all alphas with strong names such as Chief, Duke, King, Boss, and Rex don’t quite know what to make of The Little Pilot as they refer to Atari, but they recognize it is doing the right thing to help the boy. A familiar Wes Anderson coterie voices the dogs including Bill Murray, Ed Norton, Jeff Goldblum, and Bob Balaban. Bryan Cranston is the newcomer to the bunch voicing Chief, a stray who’s been known to bite kids.
Perhaps the dog pack gives Atari the benefit of the doubt because they can sense he has a good moral compass. In a city which has lost its way and inner compasses don’t know which way is true north, Atari is true blue. Isle of Dogs is an adventure story at its core as the ad hoc crew travels from one end of Trash Island to the other side where it’s rumored a pack of cannibal dogs has captured Spots. There are surprises aplenty, but there are also subtle homages to Japanese masters such as Kurosawa and Miyazaki. Anderson, Schwartzman, and Coppola did not dream up Japan as a setting on a lark, they are also here to celebrate a few of their cinematic heroes.
I am here to celebrate the feat of bringing inanimate objects made out of lumps of rubber and metal to life. There is no shortage of other stop-motion films the last few years with the best being The Boxtrolls and Shaun the Sheep Movie. Isle of Dogs, considering its setting, is like a Kubo and the Two Strings adventure combined with a film noir take on Lady and the Tramp. There will always be those eye-rollers out there who mock Anderson’s style because he casts the same people and shoots his films in a very distinct manner, but I say celebrate the consistency for what it is - the mark of an auteur who knows how to delight audiences in a movie theater. Sit back and marvel at the virtuosity of this production and then go home and give your dog a hug. If you have a cat like my family at the moment, don a hockey mask and catcher's mitt first, and then go for that embrace.
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