2018 - ISLE OF DOGS - 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.

1994 - BOTTLE ROCKET, Wes Anderson short film

Bottle Rocket is Wes Anderson's really low key comedy about a couple of small time thieves.  It's also the first film for Anderson and like Spielberg's Amblin' it defines his style for all of his subsequent films.

It's either interesting or depressing to see a director continue to make films in the same style as his first short film.  Everyone knows what a Bergman, Hitchcock, Fellini or Welles film looks like, but these were guys who had years to develop their craft, Anderson has been  rigidly locked into a very formalized style since this first film.

Anderson's made some good films, but he reached his peak of artistic indulgence with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a film so inside and indulgent nobody knew what to make of it.  It also flopped at the box office.

This short film has it good points and bad points, some funny if very quirky humor and an overall utter pointlessness.

13 minutes, written by Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson.

2009 - FANTASTIC MR FOX, coy, smartass junk from Wes Anderson

Tiresome film from Wes Anderson who has finally managed to beat me down with his his oddball style of humor and filmmaking.

Artistic arrogance can be the only explanation for this film.  The animated characters are the typically quirky and weird characters Anderson puts into his human films.  The problem is that their constant pseudo hip chatter makes them sound more elitist than normal, nobody ever talks like this,  humans or animals.

The deliberate jerky stop motion animation technique also comes off as just another stunt when it's supposed to be retro clever.  Ray Harryhausen worked for years to perfect this technique, Wes Anderson only uses it because he thinks a whole 90 plus minute movie of  jerky animal characters will be funny.

This ongoing trend of using name actors for animation characters continues with this film.  George Clooney, and Meryl Streep bring nothing to the voice work on this film other than to remind the viewer that Mr. Fox sounds like Academy Award winning actor George Clooney and Mrs Fox sounds like Academy Award winning actor Meryl Streep.  To me it just comes off as a couple of actors slumming for an easy paycheck for a few hours of work.

I've liked some of Anderson's films in the past but The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was just plain  indulgent crap for the sake of indulgence.

Fantastic Mr Fox is another Wes Anderson film in a similar style, I hated this film.

90 minutes.