Plus Wes Anderson’s The Isle of Dogs
Isle of Dogs Cert TBC, 101 min
Dir Wes Anderson Voices Bryan Cranston, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel, Bob Balaban, Greta Gerwig, Kunichi Nomura, Courtney B Vance, Fisher Stevens, Liev Schreiber, F Murray Abraham, Frank Wood, Yoko Ono, Ken Watanabe
Everything you might expect to be cute, charming and generally edible about a canine-themed Wes Anderson stop-motion animation is spectacularly upended, then poured into a landfill, during Isle of Dogs. Unveiled yesterday as the Berlin Film Festival’s star-packed opening-night film, as The Grand Budapest Hotel was before it, this is by some measure Anderson’s weirdest concoction, in all sorts of good ways. And it probably counts as his most daring, too.
The film is about a diseased community of unwanted mutts, left on a rubbish-dump island off the coast of a dystopian future Japan. Voiced by the likes of Bryan Cranston, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray and Edward Norton, these dogs do not play nice. When we first meet them, they’re lamenting their predicament as outcasts – ejected by the dog-hating authorities after an epidemic of canine flu – and tussling over a sack of maggot-infested food that drops from the sky.
Amid this fracas, Cranston’s Chief tears another dog’s ear off, spits it out, and kicks it away, where it’s promptly gnawed by rats. Later, all the precision and detail of Anderson’s top-flight modelling team are set to work on an anatomically perfect (human) kidney transplant. This is not a cosy Wes Anderson film, be very sure of that.
Watching Anderson go this dark might take some viewers aback, but there’s remarkable beauty and a sober delight to his vision of creatures scrabbling for survival. He has emphasised his debt to the Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa, and while the quest in the story, to find a missing guard dog called Spots, recalls some of that director’s samurai films, the setting is very specifically indebted to Dodes’ka-den, his multi-strand 1970 drama about people subsisting atop a garbage heap. This, then, is Dog-des’ka-den! You read it here first.
The allusions are worn lightly enough to be ingenious background. But the film’s graphic detailing, even by Anderson’s standards, is an everreplenishing smorgasbord. Japan, 20 years hence, is coded crimson-red as a diabolical tyranny, with Orwellian posters scowling down depicting Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura, a co-screenwriter also), the dog-phobic, cat-stroking despot. His son Atari (Koyu Rankin), a rogue pilot, is the one looking for Spots, his redoubtable pet known as “dog zero” for being the first dumped on Trash Island.
Amid some of this flashback-heavy exposition, Anderson throws us one still image of imperilled dogs cast out to sea, instantly recognisable as
The film’s graphic detailing, even by Anderson’s standards, is an everreplenishing smorgasbord
a superb pastiche of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
A buried treat awaits in the end scroll, with Anjelica Huston credited as “mute poodle”. And this makes you realise: for all the eccentric repartee, the film is generally at its best when the dogs aren’t talking. Few moments beat the apprehensive eye movements of Spots near the start, when he’s transported by cage across land and sea to become the first dismal resident. And nothing’s funnier than the fights, furious flurries of dust and doggy limbs, like old Hanna-barbera set pieces spun out of control.
The film flirts with grotesquery and even shocks with its late-breaking gambits. For once, in tone and in habitat, this director has well and truly exited his comfort zone.