155 WES ANDERSON UTOPIA REVISITED

Frank LloydWright’s Imperial Hotel rebuilt, the Kenzo Tange’s futuristic architecture and the Metabolist movement. The Texas director goes back to the future in his latest animated feature, the meticulously crafted Isle of Dogs

A crew of 670 people, 144,000 frames, more than a thousand puppets, both human and canine. Wes Anderson’s just-released film, Isle of Dogs, is already setting records. The second stop-motion animated feature after Fantastic Mr. Fox may just be the most ambitious project by the American director, adding 240 architectural sets to the already impressive figures (with a bewildering number of details). All were built by hand in three different formats, the largest being nine metres, the smallest about the size of an iPhone. The majority of them shot for no longer than two seconds, then archived. Paul Harrod, the set designer with 30+ years of experience who created them, admits that « Nothing truly prepares you for the experience of working withWes Anderson». In fact, the sentence he heard repeated most often between takes was: « I wonder if we can do it some other way». «He always challenged us to think differently, to bring a fairy- tale vision to life without compromise ». A fable in which a 12-year-old boy, Atari

Kobayashi, heroically hijacks a turbo-prop plane and flies to Trash Island to find his dog after an ordinance from the corrupt mayor of Megasaki has banned all canines from the city. On the isle of refuse, Atari, with the help of a pack of man’s best friends, sets out on an epic voyage that will eventually determine the fate of the entire prefecture. It’s set in the Japanese archipelago, thirty years into a dystopian future. However, the point of departure isn’t 2018, but 1963, the year when Akira Kurosawa directed High and Low, a drama set in coeval Japan, when Tokyo dreamed in neon and billboards. To represent that utopian ‘tomorrow’ of yesteryear the crew tapped into the architecture of Kenzo Tange (who designed, among other buildings in Italy, the towers at the Bologna fairgrounds and the Quartiere Affari business district of San Donato Milanese) and the Metabolist movement, without falling victim to clichés. «We tried to stay true to what could have been a credible futuristic city in the Sixties», continued Harrod. «The Metabolists were as avant-garde as anyone could be, with their rectangular and cylindrical buildings conceived of as continually-growing biological elements and their mini capsule residences that resemble automobiles. However, it was clear we didn’t want a setting that was too futuristic either, like the city in The Jetsons. Megasaki had to be a little old and a little new, traditional and also Modernist». The now-demolished Imperial Hotel of Tokyo, built by Frank LloydWright in 1923, inspired the red lacquered residence of the mayor, with an elongated, less horizontal plan, making it more threatening. It’s what the New York Times calls the ‘anatomy of a scene’, the typically Wes-Andersonian frenzy of taking the most chaotic, confusing situations and giving them impressively musical visual order. «Like a suite by Sergei Prokofiev», Harrod confirmed. It’s a trademark style that’s entirely his own, as unmistakeable as it is imitable. And indeed, the first propplane has already made an appearance on AccidentallyWesAnderson.com, the site dedicated to the director’s aesthetic wit.