Review – Isle of Dogs

Isle of Dogs is Wes Anderson’s biggest and most ambitious movie to date.  It might sound crazy, seeing as it is an animated movie with talking dogs, but Anderson has never made a like this before.  This is an animated comedy that is also part Western, a sliver of film noir, and a political drama.  It’s a lot for Anderson to handle and he handles it well, for the most part.

Isle of Dogs is set in the near future, where Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura) has banned all dogs from Japan to trash island because of a mysterious dog flu that has infected the entire country.  A young American foreign exchange student, Tracy Walker (Greta Gerwig), starts to uncover what seems to be a government conspiracy against dogs.

Meanwhile, on the island, a group of dogs named Chief (Brian Cranston), Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray), and Duke (Jeff Goldblum), find Atari (Koyu Rankin), a young Japanese pilot who crash landed on this island looking for his dog, Spots.  The dogs and Atari travel across the trash filled island in search of Spots, while trying to survive Kobayashi’s military personnel along the way.

This movie does have a lot happening in it, and at a runtime under two hours, not everything lands smoothly.  Atari’s journey to find Spots is something right out of a Western.  It’s a sprawling journey that brings two opposite people (Atari and Chief) together, with a unique, unqualified group (Rex, King, Boss, and Duke) tagging along, some bizarre characters along the way, and a central evil chasing them all while traveling across the vast, beautiful landscapes.  If John Ford had made an animated movie, it would be something like this.  However, Atari’s journey gets resolved a little too fast and seems like a story he wanted to tie up quickly so he could bring it in with his bigger story.

On the main land, Tracy is a mini detective and is convinced their is a government conspiracy around the dog flu.  She leads protests and has a F.B.I string board connecting big players to the conspiracy, and she isn’t wrong.  The cat-loving Mayor Kobayashi wants nothing to do with dogs, and even when a scientist finds a cure for the dog flu, Kobayashi takes action to make sure it doesn’t get out.

Atari and the dogs eventually make it back to the main land as soon as Tracy makes a big break in her case and Kobayashi is waiting for the results on election night and the movie comes to an explosive ending.  All of the plots in the film are interesting and Anderson writes really interesting characters.  But every story left me wanting more, like their was more to explore with each one.  And their is an over-arching story that resembles Kobayashi running a Nazi-like regime that doesn’t really fit.

Like all Anderson movies, the movie is a visual marvel.  This is one of the prettiest animated movies I have ever seen, with some striking imagery and beautiful screenshots that I want to hang on my wall immediately.  The way he composes shots is unlike any director working today.  The cast is stellar, as always, with great voice work from everyone.  I particularly loved Gerwig as Tracy, Cranston as Chief, and Goldblum as Duke, who is a dog who knows all the rumors going around the island.  It’s comedy gold.

One of the best thing Anderson does is utilize the Japanese language and mixing the English in with it.  Sure, the dogs speak English, but Atari, Kobayashi and all the other Japanese characters speak Japanese.  Anderson also doesn’t use subtitles and the only way we know what they are saying is through a translator or a television broadcast, which isn’t every scene.  What this allows is for Anderson to animate the character’s faces to show us the emotions that they are feeling.  We don’t know what they are saying, but we can tell when they’re angry, sad, or happy just by their animated faces and that is a testament to Anderson as a director and as a man who understands characters.

With all Wes Anderson movies, I grow an appreciation for them the more I watch them.  At the time of writing this, Isle of Dogs is a movie I genuinely enjoyed and loved looking at, but felt there were aspects of the film that were unfulfilled.  I will for sure be seeing this movie again and I’m sure the repeat viewings will reveal more of the film.  But for now, this is a cluttered, smart, funny, wonderfully animated movie.

Did you see Isle of Dogs?  What did you think?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, or on Facebook by searching Kevflix.