Critics reviews

Like The Grand Budapest Hotel, this visually meticulous stop-motion animated feature is in part about the authoritarian takeover of life’s small pleasures, though its central metaphor is lost in one of Anderson’s weakest plots. But despite its flaws, Isle Of Dogs is a feast of forms, filled with jokes, title cards, strokes of technical ingenuity, and striking, Kurosawa-influenced color schemes.

The result is a quaint tale about the courage of society’s (literal) underdogs, transposed alongside a clumsy and awkward tribute to Japanese culture that teeters between heartfelt sincerity and appropriative hipster aestheticism – unfortunately, Isle of Dogs too often falls into the latter category.

It may be a bleak premise, but Anderson infuses it with humor, employing his trademark comic patter to enliven the dire situation.

Even more than most of Anderson’s films, Isle of Dogs will attract repeat viewings because it is so densely packed with sly visual gags and quietly hilarious minor characters (such as Tilda Swinton’s Oracle Dog, whose mystic reputation is down to quoting TV news headlines as if they were prophecies) that a single watch won’t pick up half the prizes.

Anderson's fluidity risks being taken for granted—it isn’t easy to make a movie this easy to enjoy. By means of ingenious design, Anderson has achieved an unusually straightforward emotional appeal, in the process reconfirming himself as America’s foremost vanilla formalist. And though we have need of our lone wolves, this shouldn’t discount the joys of a companionable cinema.

Isle of Dogs confronts the themes of autocracy and media misinformation, but the conceit its drama hinges on (“Whatever happened to man’s best friend?”) is a cheeky kind of propaganda itself. Is Anderson so desperate to imagine what it feels like to be Othered?

Fantastic Mr. Fox, exquisitely crafted as it was, now looks almost scrappy compared to the aesthetic brilliance and ambition of Isle of Dogs, which seemingly aims to set a new benchmark in cinema: most exhaustive compendium of visual styles in an animation ever, most densely crammed frames, most expressive yet determinedly non-cute funny animals.

No contemporary director delights like Anderson does in depicting military or quasi-military organization, its somewhat ludicrous yet deeply earnest and potentially very effective rituals and hierarchies. In that regard, “Isle of Dogs” is something like Anderson’s first John Ford movie—filled with the emotionalism of respect and principle, embodied in the dogs’ own organization and in their relationships with humans.

Movies that were a lot of work to make shouldn’t be a lot of work to watch. But Wes Anderson’s ambitious yet faltering stop-motion adventure Isle of Dogssentences us to hard labor every minute: not a moment goes by when we’re not reminded how much cleverness, how much painstaking planning, how much meticulous manipulation went into this doggo-dystopia fable set in Japan some 20 years in the future.

Mr. Anderson pulls you hard into “Isle of Dogs.” His use of film space, which he playfully flattens and deepens, is one of his stylistic signatures; he likes symmetry and, in contrast to most directors these days, does a lot inside the frame. He’s especially inventive in this movie, and I could watch hours of its noble dogs hanging out, sniffing the air.

It’s complicated. Isle of Dogs is visually dynamic in a way that reminds you not only who directed this movie, but also who that director’s influences are. It’s the little things, like the way Anderson stylishly foregrounds characters looking out at the horizon, that feel blatantly borrowed from, among other sources, classic American Westerns.

A splendid jewel box of a movie about rather grisly matters, the filmmaker’s latest represents another example of the clash between his playfully self-aware aesthetic and his growing obsession with our inhumanity.