VR goes to the (Isle of) Dogs
Wes Anderson’s film isn’t at the festival itself, but immersive making-of movie does more than whet the appetite
“We wanted to use cinematic virtual reality to ‘miniaturize’ audiences and immerse them into the world of the film.” FÉLIX LAJEUNESSE OF VR COMPANY FÉLIX & PAUL STUDIOS
PARK CITY, UTAH— The future of film is furry, with a cold damp nose. I’m seeing it with my own eyes, and hearing it straight from the pooch’s mouth, so to speak, via Isle of Dogs Be
hind the Scenes (In Virtual Reality). It’s a VR installation premiering at the Sundance Film Festival of Wes Anderson’s upcoming new stop-motion animated feature Isle of Dogs, due in theatres March 23.
Through the magic of modern technology, I’ve been swept away from the mountainside Google/YouTube party I’m attending to a remote island of trash and talking canines off the coast of Japan.
Sitting on a plush swivelling stool, I’m wearing big VR goggles and a pair of headphones which shut out the pounding rap and R&B of the party room. It’s a weird and wonderful experience, and also very meta — at my back, human animators are busily creating the VR movie I’m sitting in, apparently not noticing me.
I hear a voice and when I swivel around to check it out, I’m greeted by mutts beseeching my attention, although none of them bark. They’re surrounded by heaps of old tires, broken-down cars and assorted detritus.
One after the other, they stare me at me in the eye, telling me of their exiled plight due to human fears of a deadly “canine flu.”
They also share their life philosophy, giving me “paws” to reflect.
“Dogs are like a gift from God,” says a mongrel named Boss, voiced by Bill Murray, who sports a faded baseball jersey.
The canine cast members are voiced by A-list actors, many of them Anderson film regulars. Besides Murray’s Boss, there’s Bryan Cranston’s Chief (who actually is leader of the pack), Jeff Goldblum’s Duke (named after Duke Ellington), Edward Norton’s Rex, Bob Balaban’s King, Scarlett Johansson’s Nutmeg and some kind of pug voiced by Tilda Swinton, who wants me to know how much love dogs have in their hearts.
“The heart of a dog is a bottomless thing,” she says.
Suddenly, a large rat runs toward me, then darts to one side. I instinctively move out of its way.
Anderson’s full Isle of Dogs, which follows a boy’s quest for his lost pooch, is set to open the Berlin fest on Feb. 15. This VR making-of film at Sundance is the first time I’ve attended the world-premiere preview of a film that is premiering at another festival.
Five minutes long, this VR experience — soon to be available to the masses via YouTube and Google Pixel phones — is like a trailer on steroids. There’s Canadian content: it was created by Montreal duo Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël at their VR company Félix & Paul Studios.
“Wes and his team have built an extraordinarily beautiful and intricate world . . . with magnificent miniature sets and puppet characters,” Lajeunesse says via email.
“We wanted to use cinematic virtual reality to ‘miniaturize’ audi- ences and immerse them into the world of the film, to encounter the dog characters from up close and to witness at the same time the prodigious craft of the stop-motion animators and artists behind the film. Wes and his team were truly inspiring to work with.”
The future benefits and current limitations of VR technology are much in evidence with the installation. It creates a genuine you-arethere experience, a far cry from the fakery of 3D. And it’s beginning to attract world-class directors like Anderson, who previously explored stop-motion animation with Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009, and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, whose VR installation Carne y Arena (Flesh and Sand), transporting viewers to the desert-crossing plight of illegal immigrants, deeply impressed me at Cannes last year.
The downside is you still have to deal with cumbersome goggles and headphones, and it’s difficult to imagine watching an entire feature this way. It’s also hard to really care about the characters of Isle of Dogs at this point, including the kid searching for his lost dog Spots, because the story hasn’t been revealed yet.
At the moment, virtual reality is also a solo experience, one viewer at a time. It’s quite unlike the traditional way of viewing movies — in a crowded room in the dark — but it’s much like how people described Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope back in the 1890s, a time when seeing movies meant going to a peep show.
From there came a global art from that continues to evolve, amaze and wow . . . and also to woof. Making America Nazi: Another short film dazzling Sundance festival attendees is Marshall Curry’s A Night at the Garden, which is made from archival news footage of a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden on Feb. 20, 1939, attended by 20,000 American supporters of Adolph Hitler’s anti-Semitic Third Reich. This happened just seven months before Hitler invaded Poland and the Second World War started.
Billed as a “pro-American” rally, it features children in Hitler Youth regalia and adults giving the Nazi salute as a speaker talks of taking back the land from the “Jewish-controlled press” and other perceived threats.
On the stage is a giant-sized painting of George Washington, flanked by swastikas and U.S. flags. A protester rushes the stage and he’s knocked to the ground by brownshirts, who begin to beat him until cops intervene.
It brings right to mind last summer’s neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., where tiki-torch bearing Hitlerites clashed with anti-fascist protesters, killing one of them.
A Night at the Garden lasts just seven minutes, but it’s a chilling reminder that the so-called alt-right of current times has roots in a very dark past, right in the U.S.A.
Sundance festival director John Cooper calls it one of the most incredible films he’s seen at this or any other festival, and I certainly agree.
The downside is you still have to deal with cumbersome goggles and headphones, and it’s difficult to imagine watching an entire feature this way