Review of Isle of Dogs (2018) by Davidwashere — 04 May 2018

Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs is a wonderful movie about dogs. Surprising coming from Wes Anderson, but Isle of Dogs is a tribute to dogs! They are cute and loyal and possibly sounds like Jeff Goldblum if you are lucky!

The stop-motion is beautiful! The movement is fluent and very accurate to how dogs move, and the designs are stellar! It's beautifully shot too, a trademark of any Wes Anderson feature, and the world is unique and lively. In terms of scale and even the actual method of animation, is surpasses Anderson's first animated feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox by a mile. The voice acting is top notch, with a major standout going to Bryan Cranston as the main dog Chief. It's one of the best celebrity voice acting I have heard in a long time! It does have the effect similar to James Franco in the Disaster Artist where he is doing such a good job that everyone else looks a lot worse by comparrison, as many of talented voice cast do more of the Wes Anderson monotone, however for the world that they inhabit they do match perfectly. And the friendship between Chief and Atari is cute and quite touching, albeit brief.

The main issue does come into the use of Japanese language. This does tie into the controversy of cultural appropriation. While it is true that the Japanese setting is mainly for aesthetic purpose rather than a deeper meaning, I wouldn't say it's that big of a deal in terms of the film's quality. However when it comes to the language barrier, it is a problem. Often they do have either characters narrating over as translation, which is fine like the case with Francis McDormand's character, other times the film have other characters English-speaking characters narrate for no real reason. I wished that Wes Anderson either just had subtitles, or just not had any and let the actions of the Japanese characters speak for themselves without having any translations, as some of the best scenes of the movie use the visual storytelling of animation speak for the non-English characters. Also Greta Gerwig's character in the film is rather pointless with her ark having a bigger narrative that the film suggests but never having a satisfying conclusion, unless it is meant to be a subtle commentary on the white savior trope.