A weird and daring canine concoction

Isle of Dogs PG cert, 101 min

Wes Anderson

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

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. This is Anderson’s weirdest concoction ever, in all sorts of good ways. And it’s probably his most daring, too.

The premise hardly hides all this away. It’s about a diseased community of unwanted mutts, voiced by the likes of Bryan Cranston, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray and Edward Norton, who are dumped on a trash island off the coast of a dystopian future Japan.

When we first meet them, they’re lamenting their predicament as outcasts from human society – ejected after an epidemic of canine flu – and tussling over a sack of maggot-infested food which drops from the sky.

Watching Anderson go this dark might take some viewers aback, but there’s remarkable beauty to his vision of creatures scrabbling for survival. He has emphasised his debt to the Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa with this whole idea, 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 1970 drama about people subsisting atop a rubbish heap.

Individually, the voice cast have less to do here than they did in Fantastic Mr Fox – there are more characters to divide the lines between – but most get moments to relish. Harvey Keitel nearly steals the honours with a cameo as the head of a rumoured cannibal clan. But 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 island’s first dismal resident. And nothing’s funnier than the fights, flurries of dust and doggy limbs, like old Hannabarbera set pieces spun out of control.

The film flirts with grotesquery and shocks with its late-breaking gambits. For once, in tone and in habitat, Anderson has well and truly exited his comfort zone. TR