Isle of Dogs

The artisanal process of stop-motion feels like a natural medium for a director as fussily detailed and idiosyncratic as Wes Anderson. His handcrafted forays into the medium have produced two distinct films that both provide a melancholic, winsome experience. He manages to, as Chuck Jones once described the entire process of animation, provide the illusion of life in his frames.

There’s a pleasingly tactile quality to every decision in Isle of Dogs. From the clouds that look like cotton balls pulled apart, to the explosions that appear like felt being shredded, to the matted dog fur that’s never quite consistent due to the animator’s hands moving it around, Isle of Dogs feels like a world in miniature infused with living dolls. Anderson’s penchant for symmetrical compositions remains as the film is littered with squares with squares and ornately designed with precision and purposefully analogue.

There’s only so much eye candy can paper over, and Isle of Dogs is aggressively bleak in its story and character development. The cruelty of humans in the name of profits and unquestionably selfish motives gets unscored in the eyes of these abandoned and abused dogs that still yearn for a scratch behind the ear. The greatest emotional pull in this film comes from the sight of dog puppets giving sad eyes.

It’s a glorious bit of dioramic dramatics that functions as a metaphor for the disenfranchised trying to escape persecution. What ever did these dogs do to deserve getting dumped on a trash heap in the Pacific? Something or other about a “snout fever,” but it just boils down to the prejudice of those in charge trying to remove the societal undesirables from the greater populace.

Can Anderson’s film really sustain that much emotional heft and symbolic import? Well, no, not quite, but it’s still heart wrenching and engaging. It somehow works to his strengths as an artist that stop-motion is already a facsimile of real life, so his tendency to art direct and reshape reality into his own variation of the world comes off easier and with more fluidity here.

I say all of this as a fan of his work, but I’m aware that Isle of Dogs has issues and ideas that it cannot quite reconcile with its lovely bric-a-brac. Did I care in the end? Not really. Isle of Dogs hit so many sweet spots and moments of pure cinematic elation and emotional complexity for me that I could forgive the foreign exchange student being another of Anderson’s strident overachievers without the “oomph” quality that made the others more engaging, for example.

Is this Anderson’s weirdest and darkest movie to date? Quite possibly, and I can’t think of a contender that would come quite as close to it. Yet for all its stark, tense qualities there’s a romance that bubbles up in unexpected moments. It’s these zigs and zags between emotional extremes that keeps things lively and interesting throughout. Ok, and the star-studded voice cast doesn’t hurt in the slightest. While Isle of Dogs may not rank among the highest of Anderson’s work, I still really loved it and its ambition.