Isle of Dogs

2018 dog cartoon

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A kid named Atari steals a flying machine and heads to Trash Island where dogs, including his beloved Spots, have been quarantined after an epidemic of Snout Fever. Gradually, characters realize that there's something more sinister afoot.

I searched my blog to see if I had used the word "afoot" before. I did in a write-up of The Asylum's Sherlock Holmes rip-off (the one with a dinosaur) when I compared its use to digging up Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and urinating on his corpse, it popped up when I wrote a plot synopsis for Them!, and I used it accidentally in a typographical error when writing about The Searchers. I don't know why I think anybody would care about any of this.

It's nearly impossible for me to write objectively about a Wes Anderson movie. They're comfort food, and I'm not sure this one could have come along at a better time since I've been in a major funk lately. Middle-age, futility, a depletion of creative energy, a lack of really comfortable shoes. Seeing the same preview for this over and over for months gave me hope that some stop-animated, droll dogs and a twee appropriation of Japanese culture could turn my frown upside down. Or sideways! That would be cool. I could walk around like a Picasso.

The stop-animation is so well done. There's a rich attention to detail that will make this a rewarding rewatch and probably equally rewarding the other thirty or so times I watch it since that's what I do with Wes Anderson movies. You've got individual shots that had to have taken hours to create, and although they're completely unnecessary to our plot or understanding of the situation these characters are in, they add so much wonder to this world Anderson and his team of animators are trying to create. Background details that most people aren't going to even bother noticing with a superficial first viewing color this world and give it depth. I assume that's true anyway. I'm writing this after a superficial first viewing. Visually, this is an artistic triumph, and I wish there could be an award given to every single person who helped comb dog fur or move a Japanese doll's arm a fraction of an inch.

There's a complexity to the storytelling that would probably make this tough for children to follow. It might even be tough for dumb adults to follow. There's also a darkness that would make it tough for children. Some real violence, skeletal remains, all that apocalyptic trash, government conspiracies and subsequent cover-ups. The boy's search for his dog at the heart of this is about as simple as a story could be, but Anderson and his co-writers, regular collaborators Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman as well as some guy named Kunichi Nomura who has no other filmwriting credits but did appear in Lost in Translation and Grand Budapest, give the story plenty of wrinkles, making it convoluted and chunky. I suppose you could say it's a bit too heavy with ideas, and the last half an hour or so gets a little too wacky in that same way that Mr. Fox and Life Aquatic do.

Children would also have trouble with the disjointed narrative. A narrator helps a bit, and title screens telling us when the action is moving forward twenty years, or back five months or ahead thirty minutes keep us from being completely confused. It also might be a little hard to adjust to the untranslated Japanese in this. We (and the dogs) don't know what Atari is saying, and a lot of the Japanese politicians or scientists aren't translated either. You can always figure out just enough so that the untranslated dialogue still pushes the plot forward though. And I liked the irony that we can understand the dogs perfectly but not most of the human characters. But I can see that being a source of frustration for some people.

The voice performances are great from the top of the credits to the bottom. I'm not sure all of the characters were completely necessary, but when Wes Anderson wants to make a bunch of figures to move around this stop-animated world, I'm not going to argue with him. Does Scarlett Johansson's Nutmeg need to be in this movie? I don't know, but I'm glad she was because it's not often you get to be sexually aroused by an animated dog. It's happened to me more than you might think, but it's not a regular occurrence or anything. All of the voices, even when they're at their most animated and bombastic, have this NPR-ish quiet to them that I really liked. Everybody also just sounds like himself or herself, making these non-human characters feel more natural. Nobody pushes here. It's refreshing voice work in a world inhabited by yelling cartoon vampires and irritating minions. I thought Cranston, Norton, Abraham, and Goldblum were especially great. I'm not sure I fell in love with any of these characters like I have in other Wes Anderson movies, but maybe that will happen eventually.

And Bob Balaban is in this which is always worth a bonus point. And so is Yoko Ono, the best Beatle. And Anjelica Huston is credited with voicing a mute poodle.

I'm not sure what to think about this cultural appropriation criticism. I don't see it, but I'm probably not the right person to ask. It seems more like a loving tribute to a culture and filmography from that culture than anything else. I thought the music added to the homage. And although the drumming that bookends the movie, the exquisite shots of sushi being prepared, and the random shots of sumo wrestling could be seen as an American filmmaker pulling from a hastily-brainstormed list of "cool Japanese stuff," this feels more on the side of loving than offensive. I wonder if a lot of the criticism has to do with the way Anderson's worlds almost feel like fairy tale versions of reality anyway.

There's great humor and heart, animated perfection and a propulsive score, and all sorts of detail that will make this one worth watching again and again. I think it's a step up from The Fantastic Mr. Fox and look forward to a completion of this unannounced stop-motion Wes Anderson trilogy in a few years.