'Isle of Dogs' review: Anderson returns to stop-motion

I love you, Wes.

It's been four years since Wes Anderson has made a movie (The Grand Budapest Hotel, which came out in 2014). Four years is far too long for any one man to wait. What took you so long Wes? How have you been, friend?

Finally, after all this time, he’s returned — and returned to stop-motion no less, a field that he first entered in 2009 with Fantastic Mr. Fox (my second favorite Anderson film, only slightly trailing behind The Royal Tenenbaums).

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Enter Isle of Dogs, a new adventure he’s concocted about some scruffy and adorable looking canines.

Set in a near-futuristic Japan, Isle of Dogs follows the adventures of a young boy named Atari (Koyu Rankin). Atari’s parents were killed in an accident while he was young, then sending him to live with his distant uncle.

This uncle, Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura), just so happens to be the mayor of Megasaki City — a town located on the coast of Japan.

Problem is, Kobayashi and Atari share very different world-views. Kobayashi comes from a long line of cat lovers (or something like that, there’s a lot of history thrown in the opening narration) and wants to remove all dogs from the island. To do so, he hatches a whole conspiracy about a new canine disease and then has all dogs sent to live on trash island.

Atari doesn’t approve. In fact, he misses his guard dog named Spots. That’s why he hatches up a plan to get to trash island and find Spots, hoping he can find some way where they can once again live together.

Upon arriving on trash island, Spots is nowhere to be seen. Instead, he finds another pack of rogue dogs — Chief (Bryan Cranston), Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray) and Duke (Jeff Goldblum). Given that this is all the first time they’ve seen a human in years — who they are trained to be obedient to, of course — the gang is all too eager to help Atari on his mission in search of his lost pet.

All of them except Chief, that is. Chief was a stray long before the trash island decree. He doesn’t have a particular liking for humans like the rest of his pals do.

However, when Kobayashi catches word of what Atari is up to, Chief gets dragged into the whole adventure as the gang has to evade all of the mayor’s efforts of putting a stop to Atari’s scheme.

Let’s get the unpleasantries out of the way first and foremost: Isle of Dogs has been receiving some criticism due to its lack of sensitivity to Japanese culture. All of the Japanese characters speak in Japanese throughout the movie and there are no subtitles. Instead, they’re translated through voice-over narration or through Frances McDormand’s character. All of the dogs also speak English, which some people have said creates an ‘other-ing’ effect between American and Japanese culture.

I’m going to push back on this a little bit. Of course, I by no means intend to speak for everyone here and if you’re offended by this I’m certainly not going to say you don’t have a right to feel this way, but I don’t believe this was Anderson’s intent when making the movie. Yes, these issues probably should have been thought further through and perhaps some mistakes were made, but Isle of Dogs is also so rich in Japanese culture on a non-surface level in other ways that do seem respectful, that it seems crazy to think Anderson would purposefully do something like that.

I didn't see the subtitle issue as a matter of us vs. them either, I saw it as differentiating between dogs and humans. All of the dogs can understand each other and all of the humans can understand each other, we’re just looking at the story from the perspective of the dogs. Since they can’t understand the human language, it makes sense why we couldn’t either — given that Chief is the character we spend the most time with in Isle of Dogs.

With all of that out of the way (again, just an opinion that others might feel differently about), Isle of Dogs has a lot of Wes Anderson goodness and fun to offer. This doesn’t quite reach the heights of his best films, for me at least, but rather falls somewhere among the ranks with The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou or The Darjeeling Limited. That is to say; good, not great.

The stop-motion technique is really quite astonishing. Anderson took what he started with Fantastic Mr. Fox and only improved on it, as it’s a beautiful film to look at with the type of symmetry and scene-layout that the director is known for.

It’s also a very funny film in that self-aware way that Anderson knows how to capture. He’s working with his usual crew of actors (the only one missing is Willem Dafoe), meaning he knows how to write specific dialogue for people like Bill Murray and Jeff Goldblum (who has a running joke that killed me).

As for the story itself, it struggles in some places — there’s a lot of flashbacks which can create pacing issues and a sub-plot with a character voiced by Greta Gerwig offers little to the actual story — but there’s also a wholesome message of acceptance (which again points to why I don’t think Anderson intended to be insensitive) at the heart of it. The whole journey didn’t have quite the emotional tug that something like Moonrise Kingdom had, but it’s still a fun adventure to take nonetheless.

Watch the trailer for Isle of Dogs here and then let us know, in the comments below, what you thought of the movie!