Review of Isle of Dogs (2018) by Brunovn00 — 12 Dec 2019

First of all, the visual presentation is fantastic. I mostly give tons of extra points to stop motion films because, even if they are not good films in everything else besides the animation, I know what a pain in the a** making stop motion is. Not saying that 2D and 3D are easier (honestly any animation form has its level of difficulty) but stop motion requires a lot of extra work (Building the sets, the characters and all that). In that aspect, Isle of Dogs is great. I loved the visuals. I love the insane amount of detail in basically every single shot. It's really unbelievable. Not only the animation, but the style and the use of colors in general. The composition of each shot is also pretty good. Regardless of what you think about Wes Anderson, you have to admit that he knows what he is doing. I like the character design, specially the dogs. It's kinda refreshing to see a movie about dogs in which the dogs look..."Ugly". By that, I mean that the movie doesn't want you to care or to connect with the characters just because they are cute like most animated movies with animals as protagonists. Because they are not cute (They really aren't, they look terryfing but in a good way) the movie does a great job in making you like them in a different way: The writing.

Now, I have mixed feelings about the writing. I thought that there were a lot of writing choices I just didn't agree with, specially plot points and character resolutions that I thought could've been written better. Also, most of the characters were very underdeveloped. I think that only Chief and Atari were the only characters that actually had a character. They were really well developed and fairly well written. The scenes between those two characters might be some of my favorite of the movie. There were other characters that I honestly think could've been completely removed, like the "love interest" of Chief. Many of the characters were one note and leave the movie halfway through. This is why I say that only Chief and Atari are the only actual characters because those are the ones that get the most screentime and actual relevance to the plot. Most of the acting was really bland. Maybe that was the direction that Wes Anderson gave them, but I honestly didn't like most of the acting. Most of the characters sound almost exactly the same. The only performance I liked was Brian Cranston's (who played Chief).

I appreciated details in the movie as a whole, like when characters are speaking in japanese and there are no subtitles and the only way we get to know what they are saying is by an in-movie translator character or by an actual subtitle but when it's an important line. That was pretty cool, because, honestly I feel that many of the things the Japanese characters said were irrelevant. I feel like the "gimmick" of putting japanese text on the screen and underneath that text the english translation in a small font was cool at first but then starting to be overused to the point of feeling like the movie was doing it "just because it looks cool". Another issue I have, which is more of a nitpick is the fact that dogs speak in english. Why do they speak english? Do humans understand them? Do they actually talk or maybe it's just a metaphorical way of representing their thoughts? I don't know. But those are just nitpicks, like, the movie is not ruined because of that or anything. But what really stops this movie from being a flawless movie (which I think it could've been) is the writing and how some plot points are executed. This is still a great movie and while it's sadly not a masterpiece, it's really worth watching.