Wes Anderson (2018)

There haven’t been too many negative reviews of Isle of Dogs but several of them have fretted over the film’s Orientalism.  With good reason – though I had other basic difficulties with Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animation feature (his second, following Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)).  Most of the dogs, though they’re mongrels, look alike and the actors voicing them sound alike.  The problem increases once Chief, a black-haired former stray, succumbs to a bath – to remove what turns out to be grime and restore his coat to the same whitish shade as the others.  Nutmeg, a pure breed ex-show dog, is distinctive, though the odd coupling of her and Chief doesn’t seem much of an advance on Disney’s Lady and the Tramp (1955).  Anderson favours head-on shots of the dogs’ faces, which aren’t very interesting – compared anyway with their bodies in movement in long shot.  The animals’ role in resolving matters to deliver an upbeat ending is disappointingly secondary to the humans’.

The story – by Anderson, his regular collaborators Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, and Kunichi Nomura – is set twenty years in the future in Japan, where a dog flu virus has spread through the canine population.  Kobayashi, the authoritarian mayor of the (fictional) city of Megasaki, banishes the species to a virtual penal colony – Trash Island.  The first exile there is Spots, a dog belonging to Atari, the mayor’s orphaned nephew and ward.  Atari runs away from home, steals a plane and flies it to Trash Island, in search of Spots.  The set-up seems to announce an action-adventure with, since Wes Anderson is in charge, a strong comedy element.  As a succession of plot events and lines in the script, Isle of Dogs is indeed a comic adventure but this isn’t quite what the audience experiences.  What actually follows is a continuous display of intricate design for your eyes and the hum of droll, under-differentiated voices in your ears.  The effect is pleasant and mildly soporific.

The landscape of Trash Island makes for a mostly more muted palette than is usual in the world of Wes Anderson.  As hinted at in the long-winded trailer, the narrative is overcomplicated; the director’s trademark fanatical attention to decorative detail further distracts (and detracts) from the storyline.  That wasn’t a problem with Fantastic Mr Fox – an altogether more truly animated piece of work.  George Clooney’s brilliant characterisation of the title character in the earlier film would be a tough act for anyone to follow.  Although Bryan Cranston is fine as Chief, his and other male voices deliver their lines in tones that exude the knowing cool of the project – perhaps part of why it’s so hard to tell them apart.  The other four dogs who, along with Chief, help Atari finds Liev Schreiber’s Spots, are Bob Balaban, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray and Edward Norton.  The fewer female voices are more individual, though it says a lot – and a lot for her – that Frances McDormand comes through the most satisfyingly in the nearly characterless role of the interpreter of Mayor Kobayashi’s Japanese into English.  A familiar-sounding Scarlett Johansson is Nutmeg.  An uncharacteristically overexcited Greta Gerwig is the American exchange student Tracy, who eventually saves the day and pairs up with Atari.

A couple of phrases in the previous two sentences hint at the cultural tourism and WASP saviour controversies around Isle of Dogs.  The credits appear in English and Japanese.  For Western viewers, the latter characters merely contribute to a visually pleasing pattern.  (Perhaps vice versa for Far Eastern viewers but they’re hardly the main target audience.)   While the dogs’ ‘barks have been rendered into English throughout’, much of the conversation of the Japanese humans goes untranslated – relegating it to minor mumbo-jumbo.  It might be less of an issue if Anderson was consistent on this front but, of course, he can’t be, given the significance of the mayor’s pronouncements.   It’s queasy that Anderson doubly exoticises the story’s dystopia – grating that the exchange-student-cum-cub-journalist from Ohio not only sorts things out but has to rouse the Megasaki natives into action.

Alison Willmore sums things up admirably in a recent BuzzFeed piece[1]:

‘… there’s no overt malicious intent to Isle of Dogs‘ cultural tourism, but it’s marked by a hodgepodge of references that an American like Anderson might cough up if pressed to free associate about Japan — taiko drummers, anime, Hokusai, sumo, kabuki, haiku, cherry blossoms, and a mushroom cloud (!). … This all has more to do with the… insides of Anderson’s brain than it does any actual place.  It’s Japan purely as an aesthetic — and another piece of art that treats the East not as a living, breathing half of the planet but as a mirror for the Western imagination. … [In] the wake of Isle of Dogs’ opening weekend, there were multiple headlines wondering whether the film was an act of appropriation or homage.  But the question is rhetorical — the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and the former is not automatically off the table just because the creator’s intent was the latter.’

It’s been evident virtually throughout his cinema career how much canines matter to Wes Anderson.   His latest title is a homophone for ‘I Love Dogs’ and is no doubt made, as Alison Willmore suggests, with affection for Japan as well as for his favourite animals.  But it’s made with heedless self-indulgence too – and the worst of both worlds that Anderson stimulates more moral discomfort in retrospect than exciting fun while you’re watching the film.  In recent weeks, Curzon cinemas have been running an excellent turn-off-your-mobile-phones piece featuring Chief (the black scruff version) and the voice of Bryan Cranston.  This repeatedly made me laugh more than the whole 101 minutes of the actual Isle of Dogs managed to do.

2 April 2018

[1] http://tinyurl.com/y7xt9kdl