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MOVIE: Isle of Dogs

STARRING: Bryan Cranston, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray

RATING: PG

REVIEWER: Vicky Roach 3.5/5

BOY is dog’s best friend in Wes Anderson’s flea-bitten canine odyssey, set in Japan in a dystopian near future.

While 12-year-old Atari Kobayashi (voiced by Koyu Rankin), an orphan and ward of the dog-hating mayor of Megasaki, doesn’t say much, he shares an intense bond with his speckle-eared hound Spots (Liev Schreiber).

When Atari’s authoritarian guardian banishes the beloved pooch, along with the rest of the city’s canine population, to Trash Island as a response to an outbreak of dog flu, the young boy sets out to find him.

Atari’s epic journey takes him to a barren, wretched wasteland where the animals fight each other for scraps.

A pack of alpha dogs with names such as Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Duke (Jeff Goldblum), Boss (Bill Murray) and Chief (Bryan Cranston) takes pity on Atari – it seems his, ahem, dogged devotion has reawakened the old-timers’ better instincts.

Back on the mainland, the dogs’ plight is being investigated by a crazy-brave US foreign exchange student named Tracy (Greta Gerwig). An activist with a curly blonde helmet of hair and acne, she and Atari are similarly unconventional protagonists.

Anderson has a way with animals, as he proved in 2009’s The Fantastic Mr Fox, his crafty stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book.

The humour here is even darker and Isle of Dogs’ distinctive aesthetic is unusually spare and bleak.

The film has as much in common with Lassie, Benji or Beethoven as a streetwise mongrel does with a pampered show dog.A one-of-a-kind, sweet-and-salty bitser.