‘Isle of Dogs’ review: Wes Anderson’s desolate canine tale of loyalty
Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Bryan Cranston, Liev Schreiber and Tilda Swinton are among the stars who lend their voices to Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs.”
I write this sentence with a dog staring at me, wondering when I’ll slip her another slice of apple. There are no cats in the house. There never have been. My canine sympathies are clear.
Wes Anderson’s latest, “Isle of Dogs,” is worth seeing and often very droll, as well as exactingly, rigorously, fastidiously composed, stop-motion frame by frame. The film’s blatant anti-cat prejudice — I’m fine with that. We’ll get to the questions of cultural appropriation and plurality of perspectives in a minute.
This is writer-director Anderson’s second stop-motion animation feature, the first being “Fantastic Mr. Fox” nine years ago. Cool in affect and fantastically dense in its detail, it’s set 20 years in the future. The fictional Japanese metropolis of Megasaki City is run with an iron fist by a mayor (voiced by Kunichi Nomura, who receives story credit along with Anderson, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman). The mayor, the latest in a long line of feline-loving warlords, has banished all dogs to Trash Island. Looking like Toshiro Mifune from Kurosawa’s “High and Low,” from the boxy suit to the caterpillar mustache, the scowling authoritarian rationalizes the quarantine by spreading fears of a potentially fatal “dog flu” crossing over to the human population.
Spots (Liev Schreiber), the loyal dog of the mayor’s 12-year-old ward, Atari (Koyu Rankin), is the first to be exiled. Many others follow. Anderson’s interest lies primarily with the ragtag alpha-dog pack whose leader is Chief, voiced by Bryan Cranston, and who romances the deadpan show dog, Nutmeg, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Jeff Goldblum is Duke, the resident gossip; the mascot, Boss, is lent the dry distinction of Bill Murray; and Bob Balaban and Edward Norton portray King and Rex, respectively.
Scientists are close to a cure for the dog flu, but this does not suit the mayor’s political agenda. When Atari hijacks a plane and crash-lands on Trash Island, in search of Spots, Chief and his comrades assist. Eventually, compelled both by idealism and her helpless teen crush, so does the American foreign exchange student Tracy, voiced by Greta Gerwig. Three taiko drummers pop in and out of the action for brief interludes; composer Alexandre Desplat samples a variety of Japanese musical influences, although his primary theme is Russian, a re-orchestrated version of Prokofiev’s “Troika” from the rousing “Lieutenant Kije” film score.
The jolly drive of that theme contrasts the bleak environment. Trash Island is part “Wall-E,” part abandoned nuclear power plant. The dogs fight over maggoty scraps of food, and dream of their old lives. The dogs’ voices are predominantly American; Atari’s spare dialogue is rarely if ever subtitled; the character of Tracy carries a whiff of the white savior, though Anderson would no doubt argue she’s just another victim of cultural dislocation and a different sort of exile in a story full of exiles.
Anderson is one of American film’s most artful magpies, pulling ideas into his storybook from all over. The acknowledged reference points for “Isle of Dogs” include Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai”; the Rankin/Bass stop-motion TV specials (“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”); and (less so, I think) Hayao Miyazaki’s melancholic animated fantasies. The mayor’s palace resembles Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Filmed over a painstaking two years in London, where he shot “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Anderson assembled a tiptop collection of artists, among them production designers Paul Harrod and Adam Stockhausen; art director Curt Enderle; and puppetmeister Andy Gent. When you realize the time required, for example, to fashion the precise contours of King’s princely mustache, you smile in admiration.
Before the end, however, the script starts chasing its tail and its limitations become more apparent. Several critics have already weighed in on the perceived cultural appropriation going on in “Isle of Dogs.” The charge goes back to “The Darjeeling Limited,” which concerned three American brothers making their way through India. (“Privileged Anglos abroad, carrying an improbably fabulous collection of designer luggage” is how I put it back in 2007.) Just as limiting: Anderson’s relative disinterest in the female characters, who exist only in relation to how they feel about the more prominent male characters, human or canine.
To be sure, none of Anderson’s films take place in the real world as we know it. Megasaki City is a fictional creation, real world-adjacent, as was the island of New Penzance in “Moonrise Kingdom” and, more grandly, in Anderson’s finest work, the land of Zubrowka in “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” The filmmaker’s sense of humor relies on establishing an exquisite artificial universe and then puncturing the artifice with familiar, deadpan American voices and attitudes for comic effect. It works, most of the time. But marginalizing the Japanese characters within a Japanese setting invites the cultural appropriation charge.
It’s tricky: So much of the popular culture I grew up loving, and love still, trades in this sort of casual colonialism. Anderson and company set out to make their own kind of movie “in the Japanese manner,” as Jim Broadbent says in “Topsy-Turvy,” Mike Leigh’s wonderful account of how Gilbert and Sullivan came to write “The Mikado.” It’s a manner destined to be divisive, no matter how great the dogs look.
In The Guardian recently, columnist Steve Rose wrote: “If we police boundaries too strictly, we’re stifling the possibility of cross-fertilization and invention. If you do it well enough, it’s not appropriation, it’s conversation.” What’s frustrating about this worthwhile movie is pretty simple: All Anderson needed to do, really, was to let more of the characters, dog and human, female and male, have a say in how the story gets told. Also, using “Tokyo Shoeshine Boy” on the soundtrack (heard, indelibly, in Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H”) seems pretty glib. But alongside the cultural appropriation rap, Wes Anderson has heard that song before.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
mjphillips@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @phillipstribune
“Isle of Dogs” -- 3 stars
Rating: PG-13
When: Now playing
Where: AMC La Jolla, Angelika Carmel Mountain, Cinepolis Del Mar, Edwards San Marcos Stadium, Landmark Hillcrest, The Lot La Jolla
Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes
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