Stop-motion magic a mammoth effort
Isle of Dogs won over critics when it screened at the Berlin Film Festival, weaving its stop-motion animated magic and earning applause for writer and director Wes Anderson.
The film’s all-star voice cast also includes Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Bob Balaban, Greta Gerwig, and Yoko Ono.
“We wanted to do something sort of futuristic. We wanted a pack of alpha dogs who were all the leader. And we wanted to live in a land of garbage,” says Anderson. “The Japanese setting came entirely because of Japanese cinema. We love Japan, and we wanted to do something that was really inspired by Japanese movies, so we ended up mixing the dog movie and Japan movie together.”
From the intricate puppets and micro-sets, this stop-motion animated film was a mammoth effort to create. Here are some fun facts that went behind creating this howling adventure: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ There are 850 shots in the film; 76 contain 2D animation, as well as stop motion. 144,000 still frames were shot to create the 100 minutes of the film’s duration.
The largest set was nine-metres long and the smallest smaller than an iPhone. Number of puppets made: 1,097. More than 500 humans and 500 dogs.
The largest puppet creation was the oversized mouth for Spots, which was one-metre long. The smallest puppet was 15mm. Atari’s hair was hand punched and took two days per head to fully hair. His eyebrows were individually hand applied with tweezers.
Each hero puppet took roughly 16 weeks to make. Perfecting Nutmeg’s puppet alone took over six months.
The human characters have up to 53 individually sculpted faces for their various expressions. Each also has up to 48 replacement mouth plugs for the different phonemes of dialogue. Each is individually sculpted and hand painted. Over 3,000 of these faces and mouth plugs were made. Each Tracy face contains 321 freckles. These are hand painted by eye to match a master face — in total across the various scales, and multiple faces of Tracy’s character, the paint team had to hand-paint a total of 40,000 freckles.