2018 - Wes Anderson's tribute to Japanese film , or a dog ate my film.

Wes Anderson is nothing if not quirky.  This is the second time he is involved in a stop motion film.   Previously he produced, directed and wrote (along with Noah Baumbach),  Fantastic Mr Fox.  Nine years later he was at it again with a stop motion film set in Japan about an island full of abandoned dogs.  Fantastic Mr. Fox was at least based on a story by Roald Dahl, so there was a way into that film.  Isle of Dogs was an original story with a lot of writers and seemed to be loaded with lots of cliches about Japanese life and dog fights for some reason.  It  also is a rather lopsided tribute to Akira Kurosawa even using music from one of his films at one point.

The primary story line is about abandoned dogs stuck on an island who are infected with some virus.  They are all exiled to a trash heap of an island to fend for themselves.  Onto the island lands a Japanese kid who befriends the dogs and helps them return to main stream Japan after they find a cure for this dog virus.  The whole film with fighting dogs, evil politicians, robot dogs and a dog love story just never comes together in this mishmash of a story line.

As in all of Wes Anderson's movies, there is a very formal visual look to his films.  In this film the animation while carefully composed, is rather on the stiff side.  After a while, one longs for the days of  Ray Harryhausen or Phil Tippet who could have at least made the puppets seems a little more natural in what is already an artificial setting and situation.  This style of animation may play on old TV Christmas specials like Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer or The Year Without a Santa Claus but over an hour of watching this gets pretty tiring.  

 

As with the latest Wes Anderson films, he loads it up with lots of celebrity voices, so here we go.   Bryan Cranston,  Bill Murry, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDonald, F. Murray Abraham, Fisher Stevens, Bob Balabn, and Greta Gerwig.  I'm sure I missed  a few.

I usually only list screenplay credit but in this case I think it's important to see how many hands were involved in writing this film.  Wes Anderson takes the screenwriting credit.  But the story is credited to Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Kunichi Norma.  That's a lot of cooks in the kitchen.

  The running time is 101 minutes.