No director has done more to push the oft-invisible arts of production design front-and-centre than Wes Anderson. The 48-year-old’s obsessiveness with every element of the filmmaking process is evident in his films: increasingly fabulist tales that play out in design fantasias, every (oft Futura) typeface, outfit, and newspaper a work of loving fancy. In building whole cinematic worlds, Anderson starts, seemingly, with their smallest elements; persistently employing the dated, practical effect of scale models, finding grandeur in the miniature.
Some of Anderson’s most famous shots are his dollhouse dioramas, intricate cutaways of houses, trains, submarines, and hotels teeming with capricious life. This makes the director a natural for the realm of stop-motion animation; something he first tried on 2004’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, then wholly embraced with 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. Working entirely with miniature models and created environments, Anderson is able to fashion entire dollhouse worlds.
Isle Of Dogs marks his second stop-motion animated feature, and it comes crammed with more ridiculous, pernickety, perfectionist detail than any film Anderson has ever made. You can watch it multiple times and still see new things: the bristle of rat fur; mists made of cotton-wool, waves out of fabric; a sticker on a TV set in a student-newspaper classroom that says “(A/V Dept.)”; the intricate, insane detail of every hand-painted fresco or postcard or shoji wall; the droll way a key serum is introduced with the parenthetical news-report note “(artist’s rendering)”.
Here, the artist renders another cinematic world of bittersweet whimsy and inspired song placements (if you haven’t heard the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s heartbeat-rhythm 1967 lament I Won’t Hurt You, prepare to cry). It’s another world fashioned with loving fussiness and mannered cutesiness, depicted with the flat affect of Anderson’s familiar deadpan dialogue and symmetrically-framed, square-on compositions. Only, this time, it’s a world ‘20 years into the future’, filled with ecological horror, politicised pandemic, and dark parable.
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In the fictional Japanese city of Megasaki, an outbreak of ‘dog flu’ begets a dramatic decree by its cat-loving mayor (voiced by co-writer Kunichi Nomura): all dogs are to be banished to Trash Island, an offshore waste locale that is less site of landfill, more topography of refuse. With abandoned industrial and entertainment precincts — ruined by earthquake and tsunami — and towering mountains of compacted metal and rotting trash, it’s a dumping ground for unwanted things, an eco-system built entirely from unnatural elements. Trash Island, duly, serves a grand symbol of imminent ecological crisis. Not to mention that its quarantined population evokes internment camps, this dark vision of the future weighing up tragic historical baggage. In, um, a talking-dog movie.
In the wasteland of Trash Island, packs of wild dogs roam the landscape. Of course, being a Wes Anderson film, these wild dogs turn out to talk like wry New York intelligentsia, voiced by a host of old pals and Hollywood heavies: Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Bob Balaban, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, F. Murray Abraham. Into their midst crashlands an outsider, a 12-year-old boy (Koyu Rankin), who’s runaway to Trash Island, looking for his lost dog.
So begets an adventure that summons the narratives of the children’s literature Moonrise Kingdom openly evoked. As we embark on an overland trek in search of a lost friend, its children and hounds journey towards the dark realities of the adult world, the earnestness and innocence of children’s moral rightness coming up against the corrupt cesspool of grown-up society, an immoral scourge of profit-driven decisions, cynical politicking, and inhuman contempt for others.
It’s interesting, then, that Anderson has been criticised for the way he has set his familiar Andersonian world against the culture and language of Japan. Chiefly in the fact that, as an opening title card tells us, ‘all barks have been translated into English’, whilst the Japanese people remain largely untranslated, unsubtitled. The intended effect is to echo the language barrier between human and canine, so that only a few key words — sit, fetch, Spots — come through. But the unintended effect is to create an awkward, othered distance between its intended English-language audience and the Japanese culture that Anderson is, otherwise, treating with such reverence and affection.
Whilst there’s an entry-level simplicity to much of this — cherry blossoms, Hokusai, taiko drumming, sumo, sushi-prep, tatami mats — Anderson also works from Japanese folkstory and tradition, shows due obsessiveness for Showa-era art and culture, references both the films and scores of Akira Kurosawa, and ultimately espouses notions of honour, sacrifice, and friendship endemic to Japanese storytelling.
Where The Darjeeling Limited turned India into a postcard-backdrop for American-abroad spiritual-enlightenment-tourism, Isle Of Dogs seeks to work within its local culture, not just on top of it; its ultimate hero being not the character bordering on white saviour (a pre-teen reporter, voiced by Greta Gerwig, reminiscent of the loudmouthed-American-exchange-student trope of animé), but its central Japanese boy. In a near-future in which both environment and politics are a corrupted, corrosive cesspool, the human impulse to care for animals shines, bright, as a reminder of our capacity for goodness.
That particular audiences have been outraged by Isle Of Dogs’ crimes of othering and neglected to see its timely, trenchant themes for modern-Japan — the tenuous relationship with an increasingly-hostile ecological climate, problems with waste and power supply and balance with nature, environmental disasters turned political opportunism — suggests a greater failure of contemporary discourse: endless online energy spent getting angry about minor crimes of cinema sidelining bigger conversations about far greater socio-political and environmental horrors. Perhaps this discourse is its own variation on an Andersonist theme: even when faced with a film about our current ecological cataclysm, the internet’s echo chamber has, instead, like the filmmaker himself, gotten obsessed with the details.
