Tripwire Reviews Wes Anderson’s Isle Of Dogs

♦ Tripwire’s contributing writer Stephen Dalton reviews Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs animated feature, out on Friday in cinemas in the UK…

Isle Of Dogs

Director: Wes Anderson

Starring: Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray, Kunichi Nomura, Jeff Goldblum, Liev Schreiber, Greta Gerwig, Edward Norton, Koyu Rankin, Frances MacDormand

Wes Anderson conjures up a richly imagined dog-eat-dog dystopia in his second stop-motion animated feature, a futuristic fairy tale which plays to the cultish American director’s best qualities while minimising his worst. Set in a near-future Japan, Isle of Dogs is easily as visually and technically accomplished as Anderson’s previous animated animal adventure, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. But it is also thankfully low on the infantilised man-child whimsy that sometime tips his work over into faux-naive cupcake tweeness.

Co-scripted by Anderson with regular collaborators Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzmann, Isle of Dogs takes place in a super-sized Japanese metropolis whose authoritarian leader Mayor Koyabashi (Kunichi Nomura) controls the populace with fear and paranoia, notably by scapegoating dogs as disease-carrying vermin. Eventually, he exiles all the city’s pets and strays to a giant offshore rubbish dump, Trash Island. But this does not sit well with the mayor’s 12-year-old nephew Atari (Koyu Rankin), who sets off on an illicit mission to rescue his beloved guard dog Spots (voiced by Liev Schreiber) from the island.

After crash-landing on Trash Island, Atari earnes unlikely sympathy and help from a plucky pack of hounds including Rex (Edward Norton), Boss (Bill Murray), Duke (Jeff Goldblum), Nutmeg (Scarlett Johansson) and even human-hating rebel loner Chief (Bryan Cranston). Meanwhile, on the mainland, American exchange student Tracy Walker (Greta Gerwig) uncovers Kobayashi’s sinister plans for his canine concentration camp, stirring up a protest movement which unites dog and human in a race against looming disaster. Canine Lives Matter.

Isle of Dogs is a comedy thriller, a dark-edged sci-fi parable and a heart-tugging paean to downtrodden underdogs everywhere. Whether by accident of design, it also feels like Anderson’s most political film to date. The story may have been conceived before the Trump era, but the film-makers admit recent global events helped reshape the narrative during its four-year gestation. Mayor Koyabashi’s populist despotism and demonisation of doggy outsiders certainly strike a timely Trumpian note, while Trash Island is uncomfortably reminiscent of contemporary refugee camp across the globe, notably Australia’s notorious offshore processing camps in Papua New Guinea.

Perhaps most of all, Isle of Dogs it is a love letter to Japanese cinema and pop culture generally. Anderson cites Akira Kurosawa as his key inspiration but there are also clever homage here to traditional woodblock design, Taiko drumming, haiku poetry, Shodo calligraphy, vintage J-monster movies and fabled anime houses like Studio Ghibli. There is even a minor character named Yoko Ono voiced by, you guessed it, the real Yoko Ono. Anderson leaves himself open to critical claims of cultural appropriation and orientalist cliche here, but it is hard to fault the film’s deep levels of witty detail and warm affection too.

In typical Anderson style, the huge sprawl of characters and subplots squeezed into this fast-moving yarn feel cluttered and superfluous in places. Some of the film’s stylistic tics also seem needlessly quirky, notably a decision to leave Japanese dialogue without subtitles. But as a pure piece of entertainment, this cute canine caper is a constant source of joy. Its inventive use of old-school stop-motion animation is particularly pleasing, with artisan physical effects like cotton-wool clouds and shiny polythene oceans displaying considerably more homespun retro charm than slick CGI. Full of dazzling visual flourishes, dry humour and surprisingly dark subject matter, Isle of Dogs could well be Anderson’s finest creation yet. It certainly ranks among his best. (Stephen Dalton)