Wes Anderson built an island out of garbage and filled it with dogs. Isle of Dogs is his second stop-motion feature after Fantastic Mr. Fox, and it runs 101 minutes. It holds an 82/100 on Metacritic.
Trailer, via SearchlightPictures.
Megasaki’s Canine Flu Decree
The film is set in the fictional Japanese city of Megasaki, where an outbreak of canine flu has spread by 2038. Mayor Kenji Kobayashi ratifies a decree banishing every dog to Trash Island, ignoring Professor Watanabe, his political opponent, who insists he is close to a cure. The first dog deported is Spots Kobayashi, a white and black-spotted male who served as bodyguard to 12-year-old Atari Kobayashi, the mayor’s distant nephew and ward.
Atari Flies to Trash Island
Six months later, Atari hijacks a plane and flies to the island, now nicknamed the Isle of Dogs, to find Spots. He crash-lands and is rescued by a pack ostensibly led by Chief, an all-black lifelong stray, alongside Rex, Boss, Duke and King. The dogs help Atari find a locked cage holding what appears to be Spots’ skeleton. It is not him. They then fight off a rescue team sent by the mayor to retrieve the boy.
Chief, Nutmeg and the Cannibal Rumor
Chief initially refuses to keep helping, then is convinced by Nutmeg, a female ex-show dog he is smitten with. The pack consults Jupiter and Oracle, sage-like dogs who guess Spots may be held by an isolated tribe rumored to be cannibals. Meanwhile Watanabe develops a successful serum and shows Kobayashi the results. The mayor dismisses him, and Major Domo, his hatchet man, orders the professor confined to his house.
The Voice Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Bryan Cranston | Chief |
| Koyu Rankin | Atari Kobayashi |
| Edward Norton | Rex |
| Bill Murray | Boss |
| Jeff Goldblum | Duke |
| Kunichi Nomura | Mayor Kobayashi |
| Greta Gerwig | Tracy Walker |
Courtney B. Vance narrates. The ensemble also includes Liev Schreiber, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, F. Murray Abraham, Harvey Keitel, Yoko Ono and Frank Wood.
Kurosawa, Miyazaki and Rankin/Bass
Anderson started developing the film in October 2015. It draws on Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki, the Rankin/Bass holiday specials, the 1982 animated film The Plague Dogs, and Disney’s 101 Dalmatians. It was produced by Studio Babelsberg and Indian Paintbrush with Anderson’s American Empirical Pictures, an American-German-British co-production.
The Boy Samurai of Legend
The film opens a thousand years earlier, when the cat-supremacist Kobayashi Dynasty declared war on dogs. A child warrior sympathetic to the dogs decapitated the head of the Kobayashi Clan, ending the war, and was immortalized as the Boy Samurai of Legend.
That prologue is the film’s best argument for itself.
What the Pack Gets Right
The stop-motion is the point, and the pack scenes carry the film. Anderson gives each dog a distinct verbal tic, and the island itself — a dump the dogs have learned to live on — does more world-building than any exposition.
The human half is thinner. The Megasaki politics are sketched rather than argued, and Watanabe’s serum subplot resolves without much weight. Atari’s search works because Koyu Rankin plays it straight, not cute.
A Verdict on the Isle
Isle of Dogs is Anderson’s second stop-motion film and the more ambitious of the two, even if it is not the tighter one. The trash island, the pack, the Boy Samurai prologue — those hold. The political machinery around them is noise, and the film knows it.
82/100.
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