The dogs are very furry.
The look of the animal “actors” in
“Isle of Dogs” is the film’s best feature. At times, it's hard to resist
the urge to muss the imperfect fur that has been painstakingly rendered
by director Wes Anderson’s animators. Especially if you’re a dog lover. As in “Fantastic Mr. Fox,”
the stop-motion creatures take on the facial characteristics of the
actors who play them, adding a comfortable layer of familiarity. Unlike
that Roald Dahl
adaptation, “Isle of Dogs” does not have a compelling story, and even
worse, it has the most egregious examples of its director’s privilege
since “The Darjeeling Limited.”
This movie really pissed me off, and the only thing I found soothing
while watching it was silently repeating to myself “the dogs are very
furry.” Reminding myself of the film’s best asset kept me from walking
out.
Anderson has gone on record citing the influence of legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki on “Isle of Dogs.” Films like “Spirited Away” and “My Neighbor Totoro”
depict Miyazaki’s visions of Japan in ways that are both
awe-inspiringly beautiful and terrifying. Even in his least successful
ventures, the attention to world-building detail is staggering. You
would think Anderson would be the perfect director to pay homage to this
master of animation; no other director working today has a bigger
compulsion for visuals than Anderson. But unlike the warm Miyazaki,
Anderson is a very cold director. He keeps everything at an annoying
hipster’s ironic distance, valuing aesthetics over meaning and context.
This may work in the spaces of Anderson’s meticulously crafted universe
of films like “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,”
but “Isle of Dogs” is set in an actual foreign country whose culture
and traditions Anderson unwisely commandeers. The results are
cringe-worthy.
“Isle of Dogs” takes place in Anderson’s rather
skewed interpretation of Japan. It’s a place where every explosion is
rendered as a cutesy mushroom cloud and the public speeches always
include haiku. It’s also a place where man’s best friend has been
banished due to a dangerous outbreak of “dog flu,” which is apparently
harmful to humankind. However, instead of being euthanized, each
infected canine is dropped on a trash-filled island that evokes memories
of “Wall-E.”
As a show of solidarity with dismayed dog owners throughout the city of
Megasaki, its mayor deports his own dog, Spots (voice of Liev Schreiber).
Spots is the first of many dogs who will inhabit Trash Island, and he
is the only one who’s privy to a rescue mission from the mainland.
12-year old Atari (voice of Koyu Rankin)
is the mayor’s ward, an orphan whose parents were killed in a tragic
accident. Spots was his companion and his security detail. He and Atari
wore earpieces which served as a tracking device. Atari plans to use his
earpiece to help him find his beloved pet. After crash landing his
plane on the island, Atari meets the group of alpha dogs who serve as
the film’s main characters. They’re a motley crew to say the least, and
despite being born and raised in Japan, they don’t understand Japanese
at all.
There’s the leader Chief (voice of Bryan Cranston)
who fancies himself the group’s leader despite the group’s reliance on
democratically deciding every decision. (Chief always takes the only
contrarian vote, rendering him powerless.) There’s also former sports
mascot Boss (voice of Bill Murray), who is still wearing his team’s jersey, and mustachioed former dog food commercial star King (voice of Bob Balaban). Scarlett Johansson
shows up in a thankless role as the only female dog to have any
dialogue. Chief calls her a bitch at one point, which I suppose is
accurate as far as Webster’s is concerned.
Rounding out the alpha dog crew are Rex (voice of Edward Norton) and Duke (voice of Jeff Goldblum), who is so gossipy he puts Wendy Williams,
Benita Butrell and TMZ to shame. When not getting information from a
pug named Oracle, the dogs rely on gossip as their primary means of
information. To quote “Pulp Fiction,” they’re “worse than a sewing circle.” Perhaps some of this potential misinformation will help Atari find Spots.
Back in Megasaki, a dog-loving scientist voiced by “The Last Samurai”’s Ken Watanabe is testing a dog flu antidote serum he’s created with his colleague Yoko (voiced by, you guessed it, Yoko Ono).
The cat-loving mayor has nefarious reasons for keeping the serum from
succeeding, and he isn’t above murder as a preventive method. Judging by
this and “The Grand Budapest Hotel,”
I get the feeling Wes Anderson doesn’t like cats. As a dog person
myself, I understand. But cat lovers may find their scapegoating here a
bit problematic.
Far, far more problematic is the character of Tracy (voice of Greta Gerwig).
Tracy is an exchange student investigating the ouster of dogs for the
school newspaper. She’s the only White person in “Isle of Dogs” and she
is the film’s White savior. It is she who rallies the protesters against
the mayor, raising her hand in what looks suspiciously like the Black
Power salute (which, if you recall, Anderson last rendered on a wolf in
“Fantastic Mr. Fox”). Speaking of Black Power, Tracy sports a hairstyle
you’d normally find on Black people or, in a less extreme fashion, on Art Garfunkel.
If Rankin-Bass were to do “The Rachel Dolezal Story,” they could hire
Tracy, though in Ms. Dolezal’s defense, she’d at least know how to make
an Afro look convincing.
Since most of the townspeople are against the mayor’s decree, this
exchange student is a completely extraneous character who denies
hometown residents the opportunity to be heard. The optics of her mere
existence are disturbing in a film in 2018. The only time “Isle of Dogs”
reaches for your sympathy is when Tracy is faced with deportation back
to Cincinnati. And in the film’s most disgusting leverage of its
privilege, Tracy physically assaults the grieving Yoko to get her to act
against the crimes perpetrated upon her by the state.
“The dogs are very furry,” I said as this scene played out. “The dogs are very furry!”
There’s
a lot of Japanese in “Isle of Dogs,” most of it untranslated by
subtitles. When it is translated, it’s by an onscreen character voiced
by Frances McDormand. Who wouldn’t want “Fargo”’s
Marge Gundersen as their personal Babelfish? Perhaps a better question
would be “why aren’t the Japanese people translated?” Atari, who is the
catalyst for this story, remains untranslated until the very end, where
most of his speech is in deference to how hot he finds Tracy, with whom
he has had no prior interaction. I suppose Anderson thought he was being
respectful toward Japanese speakers by giving them something only they
could enjoy (much like Pixar does with Spanish in “Coco”). Instead, it only adds an “Otherness” to Atari and his compatriots. Why can we understand Atari’s canine cohort, but not him?
As
always, the imagery is the best part of any Anderson film. “Isle of
Dogs” is uglier and more devoid of color than Anderson’s prior works,
but I liked the somewhat noirish appeal of the grunginess of Trash
Island. The canine voice actors know how to speak Anderson’s dialogue
and make it seem natural coming from their snouts. But as entertaining
as it is to look at “Isle of Dogs,” I couldn’t get past Anderson’s usual
clumsiness when dealing with minorities. This is a film where a
character is literally whitewashed, an act that makes him more
agreeable afterwards. “Isle of Dogs” treats this as a sight gag. It
plays more like a confession.
khds86
