Review of Isle of Dogs (2018) by K Nife C — 24 Apr 2018

Not since I saw Joel and Ethan Coen's Hail, Caesar! have I felt so baffled by a prominent director's meticulously detailed passion project. Now, in both instances, I have almost come to resent them for it. Both films are about so many things, but drawn along their respective existential narratives they fail to evoke any sort of emotional response. The significance of their setting and characters seem both essential and pointless at the same time. However, where there at least seems to be a thesis hidden inside Hail, Caesar!'s disjunctive series of homages to golden-era Hollywood amidst black-lists and red scares, Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs is either too simplistic a story for its rich Japanese dystopian fantasy setting or a high concept puppet show strung thin by too many stylistic diversions.

There are two main decisions that Anderson has made that I find fascinatingly off-putting. The first is that, amidst this exquisitely crafted stop-motion film, he has intercut layers upon layers of alternate forms of animation. Some of it is hand drawn or painted, some is CGI, and some of it is cut-out. All of these mediums are usually found sparingly in other features as well, but here they are jarringly, seemingly arbitrarily spliced in, sometimes tastefully and sometimes, it appears, because it would be too much hassle to do stop-motion. For instance, Atari's showdown with the robo-dogs at the sluice would have probably been a nightmare to frame, choreograph, and pose. I can look past this jarring effect by explaining away that if any filmmaker has ever had a clear cut vision of his composition it would be Anderson, and that was his intended purpose. I can certainly appreciate if he is trying to break out of his usually style of doing things, but I don't know if that's necessarily a good decision.

The other decision is that of setting it in Japan, with only occasionally translated Japanese dialogue, in homage to centuries of Japanese theater and art, then utilizing that as a fetishistic backdrop to a completely predictable adventure plot. There's the language barrier which he dispatches with all manners of convoluted devices for basic storytelling necessity, some more absurdly frustrating than they're worth. Compounding this is Anderson's trademark twee, existential emotionality to and from his characters, that coldness that makes the whole production feel like a science fair display. In many of his films this works to the advantage, offering levity to a dark situation or a clinical edge to an otherwise emotionally uncomfortable subject. Here it just accentuates how these lifeless simulacra are going through the motions of telling a story you've heard before. You could set this movie anywhere but Japan, but you wouldn't be able to appropriate the entirety of Japanese culture for your grotesquely cute doll/dog house film.

Maybe I'm missing something vital to the concept of the film, but it almost seems exploitative to set a movie in what is for all intents and purposes Fukushima when the characters simply inhabit that wasteland without engaging with it politically. Sure, the concepts of media manipulation, environmentalism, and political opportunism are woven into the framework, but something is missing in this fertile metaphoric territory. Man's best friend being relegated to an island of trash could point to any number of ideas, or nothing at all. I'm not asking for a map, but it just doesn't make a statement. What are we supposed to connect with here? The boy and his dog? The political struggle? The eccentric cast of English speaking dogs? This clash of western and eastern seems urbane yet pointless...except it's a great opportunity for Anderson to cram Kabuki, Katsushika Hokusai, samurais, Godzilla, sushi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Akira Kurosawa references into one film. It's impossible to discard the amount of care and craft that went into the visual elements of this film, but the intellectual core of the film is nebulous.