Psycho's Movie Reviews #223: Isle Of Dogs (2018)

Isle of Dogs (Japanese: 犬ヶ島, Hepburn: Inugashima) is a 2018 stop-motion animated science-fiction comedy film written, produced, and directed by Wes Anderson and starring an ensemble cast consisting of Bryan Cranston, Koyu Rankin, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, Kunichi Nomura, Tilda Swinton, Ken Watanabe, Akira Ito, Greta Gerwig, Akira Takayama, Frances McDormand, F. Murray Abraham, Courtney B. Vance, Yojiro Noda, Fisher Stevens, Mari Natsuki, Nijiro Murakami, Yoko Ono, Harvey Keitel, and Frank Wood. In the film, Atari is looking for his missing dog Spots on Trash Island and ends up befriending the other dogs against the wishes of his uncle Kenji Kobayashi, who has banished all dogs from the fictional city of Megasaki to the island.

A U.S.–German co-production, Isle of Dogs was produced by Indian Paintbrush and Anderson's own production company, American Empirical Pictures, in association with Studio Babelsberg; it was filmed in the United Kingdom. The film opened the 68th Berlin International Film Festival, where Anderson was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Director. It was given a limited release in the United States on March 23, 2018, by Fox Searchlight Pictures, and went on wide release on April 13. It has grossed over $64 million worldwide, and received acclaim from critics, who praised its animation, story, musical score, and deadpan humour. A manga adaptation of the film by Minetarō Mochizuki was published in 2018, beginning with the May 24 issue of Weekly Morning. The film received nominations at the 76th Golden Globe Awards, 72nd British Academy Film Awards, and two nominations at the 91st Academy Awards, for Best Animated Feature Film and Best Original Score, but lost to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Black Panther.

Plot

Twenty years in the future, an outbreak of canine influenza spreads throughout Japan including the (fictitious) city of Megasaki with the risk of becoming contagious to humans. The city's authoritarian mayor, Kenji Kobayashi, ratifies an official decree banishing all dogs to Trash Island, which is immediately approved despite the insistence of Professor Watanabe, the mayor's political opponent, who states he is close to creating a cure. The first deported canine is a white and black-spotted dog named Spots Kobayashi, who served as the bodyguard dog of 12-year-old orphan Atari Kobayashi, the mayor's distant nephew and ward. In this universe, dogs can apparently understand humans, but not vice versa, and none of the Japanese dialogue spoken by human characters is translated in the movie except through an interpreter or occasional subtitles.

Six months later, Atari hijacks a plane and flies it to Trash Island (now nicknamed "Isle of Dogs") to search for Spots. After crash-landing, Atari is rescued by a dog pack ostensibly led by an all-black canine named Chief, a lifelong stray. With their help, Atari first finds a locked cage that apparently contains Spots' skeleton, but learns that it is not him. They then fend off a rescue team sent by Kobayashi to retrieve Atari. Atari decides to continue his search for Spots, and the pack decides to help him. Chief initially declines, but is then convinced by Nutmeg, a female ex-show dog, to help the boy out of obligation. The pack seeks advice from sage-like dogs Jupiter and Oracle, who surmise that Spots might be held captive by an isolated tribe of dogs rumoured to be cannibals.

Meanwhile, Watanabe finally develops a successful serum and shows the results to Kobayashi, who only dismisses him. The professor objects, only to be put under house arrest and killed by a piece of poisoned sushi by order of the mayor's hatchet man, Major Domo. Tracy Walker, an American exchange student and member of a pro-dog activist group, suspects a conspiracy and begins to investigate. In the process of investigating, she catches feelings for Atari. Kobayashi and his political party are revealed to be actually responsible for the dog flu outbreak, seeking to eliminate the dogs as Kobayashi's cat-loving ancestors tried to do 1,000 years ago, who were foiled by a child samurai resembling Atari.

During their journey, Chief and Atari are separated from the others. Atari gives Chief a bath, revealing his white and black-spotted coat and thus his striking resemblance to Spots. The two bond and rejoin the rest of the pack, and are saved by Spots and the dog tribe from another rescue team. Spots confirms that he is Chief's older brother and that he was rescued by the tribe, who were test subjects from a secret lab that was abandoned after a tsunami. Spots became their leader and mated with a female tribe member named Peppermint, who is pregnant with their first litter. Because of these circumstances, Spots requests for Atari to transfer his protection duties to Chief. While Chief is initially hesitant, but both he and Atari accept, and bodyguard duties are officially transferred to Chief. An owl later brings word that Kobayashi has rounded up all the exiled dogs and plans to exterminate them with poison gas.

Tracy confronts Watanabe's closest colleague Yoko Ono, who confirms Tracy's conspiracy theories and gives her the last vial of serum. At his re-election ceremony, Kobayashi prepares to give the extermination order when Tracy presents her evidence of his corruption. Kobayashi proceeds to deport Tracy, but before he could, Atari and the dogs arrive. They confirm the serum works by testing it on Chief and curing him. Atari addresses the crowd and recites a haiku he wrote and dedicated to Kobayashi, rekindling the sympathy that once existed between dogs and humans. Touched by Atari's words, Kobayashi officially rescinds the dog ban. Enraged, Major Domo yells at Mayor Kobayashi for breaking the Mayor's campaign promise and tries to kill Kobayashi and initiate the extermination himself, but thanks to Spots and the activists, Domo's plans are thwarted. Atari and Spots become gravely injured during the struggle and are taken to a hospital, where Kobayashi donates one of his kidneys to save his nephew. It is later revealed that while Kobayashi did win the election, he won't hold office because he was caught in a scandal. Therefore, all mayoral powers and authorities will transfer his next-in-line, Atari.

One month later, Atari officially becomes the new mayor of Megasaki, and has all dogs reintegrated into society and cured of the dog flu, while Kobayashi and his propagandists and co-conspirators are sent to jail for political corruption, doing 30 days of community service, and paying fines of no less than ¥250,000 while Major-Domo faces a possible death sentence. Tracy and Atari become a couple, while Chief and Nutmeg become their bodyguard dogs and begin a relationship. Meanwhile, Spots (recovering from his injuries) has had a statue erected in his honour and resumes raising his litter with Peppermint under the care of a monk at a Shinto temple.

Production

Development

In October 2015, Anderson, who had previously directed the animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox, announced he would be returning to the art form with "a film about dogs" starring Edward Norton, Bryan Cranston and Bob Balaban. Anderson has said that he was inspired by seeing a road sign for the Isle of Dogs in England while Fantastic Mr. Fox was in development. Anderson said that the film was strongly influenced by the films of Akira Kurosawa, as well as the stop-motion animated holiday specials made by Rankin/Bass Productions.

Filming

Production began in October 2016 at the 3 Mills Studios in East London.

About 20,000 faces and 1,105 animatable puppets were crafted by "12 sculptors working six days a week" for the film; 2,000 more puppets were made for background characters. The detailed puppets of the main characters typically took 2–3 months to create. The animation department included a number of people who had worked on Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Virtual Reality

Concurrently with the film, Félix and Paul Studios and FoxNext VR Studio collaborated on Isle of Dogs: Behind the Scenes (in Virtual Reality), an immersive video film that places the viewer directly inside the animated world. The virtual reality film was released on the Google Pixel platform.

Soundtrack

The film's score was composed by Alexandre Desplat, who had previously worked with Wes Anderson on Fantastic Mr. Fox (film), Moonrise Kingdom, and The Grand Budapest Hotel. The soundtrack also features various original and selected songs from a variety of musicians, mainly from Japan. Some songs had origins in classic Japanese cinema such as the Akira Kurosawa films Drunken Angel (1948) and Seven Samurai (1954). The soundtrack comprises 22 tracks in total, 15 of which were composed by Desplat.

Release/Reception/Box Office

On December 23, 2016, Fox Searchlight Pictures acquired worldwide distribution rights to the film, with plans for a 2018 release.

The film premiered as the opening film of the 68th Berlin International Film Festival on February 15, 2018, and had its North American premiere as the closing film of the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, on March 17, 2018. Isle of Dogs began a limited release in the U.S. on March 23, 2018. It was released nationwide in the United States on April 13, 2018.

Isle of Dogs was released digitally on June 26, 2018, and on DVD and Blu-ray on July 17, 2018.

On streaming, Isle of Dogs was added on Disney+ in the US and Canada on January 15, 2021. It was added to the UK and Australian versions on 17 September 2021.

On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 90% based on 367 reviews, and an average rating of 8/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "The beautifully stop-motion animated Isle of Dogs finds Wes Anderson at his detail-oriented best while telling one of the director's most winsomely charming stories." On Metacritic, which assigns normalized ratings to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 82 out of 100, based on 55 critics, indicating "universal acclaim." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak reported filmgoers gave it an overall positive score of 88%.

Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three and a half stars out of four, praising it for taking risks, and saying: "It's smart and different and sometimes deliberately odd and really funny—rarely in a laugh-out-loud way, more in a smile-and-nod-I-get-the-joke kind of way."

Isle of Dogs has grossed $32 million in the United States and Canada, and $32.1 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $64.1 million.

In its first weekend of limited release, the film made $1.57 million from 27 theatres (an average of $58,148 per venue). It was the best per-theatre average of 2018 until it was overtaken by Eighth Grade in July. Sixty percent of its audience was under the age of 30. In its second weekend, the film made $2.8 million from 165 theatres (an increase of 74%), finishing 11th. The film entered the top 10 in its third weekend, making $4.6 million from 554 theatres. The film expanded to 1,939 theatres the following week and made $5.4 million, finishing seventh at the box office.

Box office $64.2 million

My Review

The difference between the absolutely amazing and incredible Wes Anderson movies and the merely good ones is this: does it have heart? This has a heart that explodes into a giant white cloud of chaotic animation.

It's also the most MOST of his films: most wonderous and frame-for-frame spectacular animation, most enjoyable characters, most talented and going-above-and-beyond what's asked of voice actors (especially Cranston, as it's his film really at hear, plus Schreiber and Gerwig - even Yoko Ono works well in a small dose), most exquisite and poetic and both dark and light, sweet and ugly, highly comedic in dialog and physical work and tragic as Miyazaki could get, and also both varied colours, and most moving music. It's the dog with the most.

It's a film where Wes Anderson dares to have imagery that isn't all nice and tidy and precise (though of course the shots all are - animation is the filmmaking sweet spot for a director who's dreams are likely storyboarded to a tee) - as the Trash Island is one of those immense locations that has varied designs as it's so large, but it shows the director, in a small way, challenging himself: can garbage and waste and filth be interesting?

Hell yes it can, and the dogs fit in to it as these outcasts who are naturally... Dogs. And yet this is the kind of work that one viewing cant suffice - you can't take in everything on one fell swoop. Just one moment where the dogs are having a discussion about what to do next (pre one of their "we're all the leader!" votes) has thr backdrop of thousands of empty bottles. Look at that shot! Just LOOK at that shot!

This movie is filled with a lot of that, but it doesn't repeat itself (or at least any more than it has to). Everything is of its piece, and while I'm not sure I can find it 100% *perfect* - the end kind of lacked some of the characters who were prominent earlier on, and this is after the action - but im sure after I see this another 3, 4, 10 times, more of the themes and little dogs will come more to light. isle of Dogs is the kind of film where you have the cutest little puppies in one scene and holocaust death camp imagery in another... And it isnt jarring in the slightest. Wow.

Love the animation and a lot of the cast (some of them Wes Anderson regulars). Really appreciate dogs and Japanese culture. There are examples of great films that mix comedy, drama and allegory. The concept really intrigued me. And Wes Anderson has an unmistakable, unique and very interesting style that appeals to me.

Isle of Dogs looked incredible from how it was advertised and it is generally one of the best received films of the year, one of the highest rated on here as well. So along with the things mentioned in the above paragraph, it quickly became one of my most anticipated films to watch and high up on my need to watch list. Watching it, 'Isle of Dogs' became high up in my favourites of the year so far and towards the top as far as Anderson's work goes.

Perhaps Isle of Dogs is a little too exposition heavy (mostly very interesting but sometimes a little rambling) at times, with it not getting going straight away.

Also found some of the female characters underused and not explored enough. A primary example being Nutmeg.

However the animation is truly splendid, full of rich detail in the backgrounds and little things, quirky and nuanced character design and vibrant colours. The music score is beautiful, energetic and whimsical, while the direction is full of Anderson's creative, distinctive and unique trademarks.

Writing is full of dry wit and has emotion and charm, probing thought too. The story is unconventional but always involving, with its fair share of entertaining moments, poignant drama (the emotional core of the story is truly touching and with a lot of charm), its affectionate and tender portrayal of dogs and intriguing political elements without it being preachy. The Japanese elements are charmingly and creatively handled, not in a biased way. Even with the quirks, there's also a maturity to how everything is done and told.

Characters are cute and offbeat while all of the voice acting is spot from the likes of Bryan Cranston, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum and Frances McDormand.

Overall, great film. 9/10