Isle of Dogs (2018): written by Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, and Kunichi Nomura; directed by Wes Anderson; starring the voices of Bryan Cranston (Chief), Koyu Rankin (Atari), Edward Norton (Rex), Bob Balaban (King), Bill Murray (Boss), Jeff Goldblum (Duke), Kunichi Nomura (Mayor Kobayashi), Akira Takayama (Major-Domo), Greta Gerwig (Tracy Walker), Scarlett Johansson (Nutmeg), Liev Schreiber (Spots), Yoko Ono (Assistant Scientist Yoko-ono), and Tilda Swinton (Oracle):
Isle of Dogs (say the title fast) may be my favourite Wes Anderson Joint. I haven't seen The Royal Tenenbaums for about a decade, and I'd have to rewatch it to come to a final decision.
Anyway, 20 years into a sporadically retro future, the citizens of the Japanese city of Megasaki exile all their dogs to the island they dump their garbage on because the dogs are carriers of a mysterious plague.
A plucky boy travels to the island in search of his dog. Several plucky people in Megasaki search for a cure. Many plucky things happen. Have I mentioned it's all in stop-motion puppetry and models except for some traditionally animated visuals?
Anderson pursues the techniques he used on Fantastic Mr. Fox to even greater aesthetic nuance and occasional hilarity. The movie looks great. The musical score by Alexander Desplat is also great. The voice work works. Really, the whole thing is great.
Even the in-film explanations of narrative decisions are funny. The dogs all speak English (well, they speak different languages depending on the country of release; in the English-speaking world, the dogs speak English). Everyone else speaks either Japanese or English in the case of the American exchange student who helps lead the battle for dogs' rights.
When exposition is needed, a translator is around within the world of the film to translate Japanese. In Japan, do the dogs speak Japanese and the people English?
This isn't exactly a children's movie, though older children should enjoy it. There's some violence and a couple of operating room scenes. Anderson seems to have picked up a welcome level of acerbic tartness from adapting Roald Dahl for Fantastic Mr. Fox -- the movie never moves too far into the twee as some Anderson films do. Its antagonists are suitably nasty. The stakes are mortal.
Isle of Dogs almost makes me wish that the YouTube parody in which Wes Anderson directs an X-Men movie were at least partially true. But better he stay away from superheroes and mainstream treacle. Highly recommended.
Moonrise Kingdom: written by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola; directed by Wes Anderson; starring Jared Gilman (Sam Shakusky), Kara Hayward (Suzy Bishop), Bruce Willis (Captain Sharp), Edward Norton (Scout Master Ward), Bill Murray (Walt Bishop), Frances McDormand (Laura Bishop), and Bob Balaban (Narrator) (2012): Another one of Wes Anderson's tiny, nearly perfect miniatures, quirky as usual and humane.
The love of 12-year-olds Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop leads them to run away from home. Well, he runs away from his Khaki Scout Troop. But all this is happening on one of the small, rural islands near New York (so far as I can tell, anyway) in the mid-1960's, and there's a major storm rolling in.
The major players are Sam, an orphan whose foster family intends to send him back to Social Services; Suzy, a depressed outsider with a great love of reading and mascara; Police Captain Sharp, a lonely bachelor having an affair with Suzy's mother, played by Frances McDormand; Walt Bishop, played by Bill Murray in mostly buttoned-down mode (though when he gets really angry, he goes outside with a bottle of booze and chops down a tree); the Scout Troop who mostly view Sam as an annoying outsider; and Scout Master Ward, a math teacher who has poured all his energies and enthusiasm into scouting.
There's also a scouting jamboree taking place on a nearby island, Bob Balaban as the narrator, a dog named Snoopy, and a whole lot of canoeing and hiking and tent-pitching. Harvey Keitel makes something of a surprise appearance as the Head Scout, while Tilda Swinton appears as an officious Social Services employee who repeatedly refers to herself only as Social Services.
The whole thing plays out in that vaguely bemused Wes Anderson fashion. There are several big laughs, but the real point of these movies seems to always be the small ways in which the strangeness of the human condition is illuminated, generally without narrative judgment. There will be a climax of sorts, and some things will get resolved, but others will not be resolved. The kids, who have to carry a lot of the movie on their own, are real charmers, possessed of the deadpan seriousness that perhaps only teenagers can muster about themselves and their primary place in the world.
Much of the movie is shot in the autumnal glow of nostalgia or a Norman Rockwell painting, occasionally lit by lightning or obscured by rain. Most everyone turns out to be a decent person in the end, flaws and all. Nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. Recommended.
