Isle of Dogs

For eyes that are tired of seeing Disney’s and Pixar’s animated features dominating the cinemas at every swivel of neck turn, Wes Anderson’s brand of animation has arrived for a fresh pleasure after 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox!

Be it live action or animation, the writer-director is easily distinguishable due to his visceral and unique sense of visual style one will never be able to see anywhere else! Isle of Dogs was no exception either. Starting from the typography to the end credits, it's mesmerizingly beautiful! His obsession with symmetry and center reference can never get old!

Animation though, has an added advantage. Since everything from A to Z can and has to be created from scratch, sky was the limit for Anderson's vision! The sheer painstaking effort that has gone into fabricating each and every element of the stop-motion caricature to be as fluid as possible was miraculous! Right from the fur, clouds, parachute, welling-up tears, surgical operation, environment swaps, smoke to the very exhalation and inhalation itself, how did the team achieved all of it remains one of the world's greatest wonders! The mix of 3-dimensional, hand-drawn, stop-motion and photorealistic animation types were mind-blowing!

But of course, Wes Anderson is not a filmmaker who prioritizes style over substance. It's obvious that he has decided to dedicate a motion picture for dogs and dog lovers. Keeping that in the story mind, he's crafted a rather fascinating premise about a boy on a journey to find his abandoned dog. The story did take a little while to settle in, but the moment you see how pitiful the dogs are being treated in this universe, your attention immediately becomes the director's! Their living conditions and desertion in locked cages can drive you mad! It's sad and heartbreaking, but guess what? Isle of Dogs was one hell of a funny movie!

The deadpan humor in this feature worked so well on so many levels! Dialogues were the bomb! And Wes Anderson's characters were fantabulous! Once you're introduced to the team of Alpha dogs that comprised of Chief (voiced by Bryan Cranston), Rex (voiced by Edward Norton), Duke (voiced by Jeff Goldblum), King (voiced by Bob Balaban) and Boss (voiced by Bill Murray), everything notched up! Decision-makings using "yay" or "nay" was rollicks! Chief especially, had a complete arc to fulfill. His chemistry with the lead boy Atari (voiced by Koyu Rankin) and Nutmeg (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) were amazing! Presentation show that he has to imagine sent laughter through the roof! Not to forget, the entire damn thing was cute! Who could ever forget the 5 small bowls for the 5 individual puppies!

Bookending a picture with chapters based on the number of Acts is not something new, but the fact that Anderson thought of using the concept of Prologue to sneak in the needed exposition was smart! So were the setups, developments and payoffs about the hacker, Wasabi poison among many others. Revelation about Chief's true fur color was so organically weaved into the proceedings! Not only the film had a strong core story and characters, Wes Anderson has made a movie that talked about society. Because of the actions taken by the principal personas in the story, we see how it affected the film's universe and brought meaningful changes for a better world! In the midst of that, he has also explored and displayed the culture of Japan here and there, with clips like the Sumo fight, drums performance, school play and sushi cooking to render it a wholesome package!

You'll have to definitely applaud Wes Anderson for employing different methods to translate the Japanese language into English. Techniques such as foreign student, simul-translate radio, interpreter and English texts in brackets with creative spaces to fit were impressive! If there's no device around to do the job, he just left it as it was, forcing us to depend on the visuals and emotions to easily figure out what’s going on. That's even more impressive! However, even though these were all good initiatives, after a while, one can't help but to ponder who were these characters translating for anyways? Are they aware of the group of theater audience watching them? It was a local event transpiring in Japan, so naturally there was no need to construe any of the local spoken matter into English, right? Or was it being telecasted to the rest of the world? Not quite sure. Since it was an animation and the tale's purely fictional, a humble suggestion would be to simply let the characters speak in English. By doing so, all these complications wouldn't have to be spent any time on. Alas, we're pretty sure Anderson and his team have their own reasons as to why it was done the way it was done.

The screenplay time-jumped frequently, with the same thing happening with locations as well until we've got a hang of it. Both of these could become distracting at times as the transition wasn't smooth. Also, it's typical of Wes Anderson's monologues to be too wordy and descriptive about immaterial stuffs. Villain Kobayashi's (voiced by Kunichi Nomura) motivation was clear, but his change of heart in the climax may have been too quick, thus not too believable.

Alexandre Desplat's score and choice of songs for the background were excellent as always! Can't wait to see what Wes Anderson does next!