Take journey to mythical ‘Isle’

From the fecund imagination of Wes Anderson comes another stop-motion gem to serve as a canine companion piece to his Roald Dahlbased wonder “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (2009). “Isle of Dogs,” which is a pun on the words “I love dogs” and which Anderson wrote with Roman Coppola, Kunichi Nomura and Jason Schwartzman, is set 20 years in a dystopian future. The mayor of the large Japanese city of, ahem, Megasaki declares that, due to an outbreak of dog flu and “snout fever,” all dogs in the city will be quarantined on Trash Island, a place inhabited only by rats and wind and made of crushed squares of the city's garbage. On this odiferous, symmetrical floating garbage-land, gangs of disheveled, hungry and sore-encrusted dogs such as Boss (Bill Murray), King (Bob Balaban), Duke (Jeff Goldblum), Scrap (Fisher Stevens), Rex (Edward Norton), Gondo (Harvey Keitel), Spots (Liev Schreiber) and alpha-dog stray Chief (Bryan Cranston) — who all sport name tags — roam, sleep, scratch themselves, search for food, talk among themselves and fight over anything edible, however insect-infested or maggot-crawling. In fact, insects and maggots are welcome. Notably, the people of Megasaki speak Japanese often without subtitles, while the stop-motion dogs speak in English, a point of contention among detractors. Like Anderson's best work, “Isle of Dogs” is a journey to a mythical world that is remarkably familiar, although everything about it is completely strange.