"Isle of Dogs"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Is Isle of Dogs dissatisfying yet wonderful, or wonderful yet dissatisfying? I know it's both, but I can't figure out if one of those emotions matters more than the other.

Every frame of Wes Anderson's stop-motion animated film is filled with incredible marvels -- this is a film I'd love to see again just to look at it, but not for any sort of emotional satisfaction, because there is no real emotional satisfaction in this film.

Watching it is akin to eavesdropping on a conversation between two really smart, droll, witty people who know that they are smart, droll and witty and aren't even aware of how much posturing they're both doing, trying endlessly to outdo each other. You're sort of glad when they finally move across the room.

The film is the same way, starting out with a dazzling visual inventiveness that first seems extraordinary, then seems overwhelming, and finally is a little exhausting.

And yet, because stop-motion animation -- even in its simplest form -- is always astonishing to behold and kind of awesome to consider, Isle of Dogs is always visually breathtaking. Maybe I didn't latch on to the story because there's so much going on in each and every frame, and because knowing what I know of stop-motion animation I couldn't stop thinking about what went into making it.

In every movie, what you see up there on screen is there deliberately. In hand-drawn animation, that's even more true -- even the smallest touches require an artist to create them. In CG animation, the level of detail can be overwhelming. But in stop-motion animation, everything that is seen on screen -- every single item, even the smallest of the small, has to be physically crafted by hand.

As if that weren't enough, all of it needs to be photographed a single frame at a time, with tiny changes in between each individual image. So, as those images flew past my eyes at 24 frames per second (that is, 24 individual moments with 24 minute variations), I kept thinking of just how little my eye was actually taking in, just how much work some people put into even one of those frames all so most of it could go unnoticed.

One tiny little prop in particular stood out: my eye latched on to a dog biscuit. In the plot of the film, the biscuit is kept zipped up in the silver flight suit worn by a boy named Atari.  Like many of the humans in the film, Atari speaks only Japanese, while all of the dogs in the movie speak English (which the film notes up front has been translated from barks by a panoply of interpreters).  The story takes place in the future, on a Japanese island city where dogs have come down with terrible illnesses, and an unscrupulous politician has turned human sentiment against all canines -- so much so that everyone thinks it's a great idea to scoop up all dogs and ship them off to Trash Island, where they won't be a health threat.

Akira is the ward of the ugly politician, who has some very, uh, shall we say, populist and isolationist views. The first dog to be taken to Trash Island is the politician's own dog, Spots, who has been a loyal bodyguard and companion to Akira.  So Akira steals an airplane, flies it to Trash Island, and goes looking for Spots.

Along the way, he meets a number of dogs, none of whom can understand the language Atari speaks, while he can't understand them, so everyone kind of does their best to try to sort out their intentions, which is in a lot of ways what all of us are doing every single day.

All the dogs on the Isle of Dogs mostly work together, though they are led by a dog named Chief, whose most significant trait is that he doesn't want to be a leader. They all help Akira look for Spots, who may be dead -- or may be the stuff of legend.

The plot goes in lots of different directions as back in Megasaki City an American foreign-exchange student develops a weird crush on Atari, while there's a lot of political intrigue -- and even a sinister assassination -- and, simultaneously, Atari, Chief, and dogs like Rex, King and Boss help Atari track down Spots.  The plot becomes incredibly complex, far more than is needed, but Wes Anderson films tend to like to have a lot of fancy, intriguing moving parts, even if most of them, like some old Victorian machine, don't actually do anything.

In a live-action film, that can be wearying, and indeed that's what I often find to be the case with Anderson's movies, but with Isle of Dogs it doesn't really matter much.  I may have lost (and later picked up) some of the strands of the plot, but it was only because my eyes were so wide looking at the movie.

It's an auditory marvel, too, with voices like Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Jeff Goldblum, Tilda Swinton and many, many other ultra-hip actors saying ultra-hip things (my favorite credit is the one for Anjelica Huston as "Mute Poodle"), which makes the act of listening to Isle of Dogs like hearing the best NPR radio play ever.

But none of that -- not the plot, not the actors -- really matters when there's so much to look at, like that dog biscuit.

It shows up on screen for about six seconds, all told, roughly the amount of time it takes for Atari to remove it from his pocket, break it in half and put it in a dog's mouth. What made me focus on it is that the dog biscuit is designed to look just like a real dog biscuit would: it's rough and uneven, with the name of the dog biscuit company imprinted on it, and it looks like it was rolled out by hand and baked in an oven.

But it wasn't. Someone had to design it, and figure out how it would look and what color it would be, and what the texture would be like, and decide the name of the company that makes it, and how big it should be, and how it should sit in the hand of the little boy, and then how it would crunch when it gets to the dog's mouth.

There are greater, much more impressive sights to behold in Isle of Dogs (the dogs and Atari all take an aerial tram trip that is glorious) but I got fixated on the dog biscuit, and while I can't remember too much of the plot, and while I didn't much care what happened to the characters in the movie, I was struck by how much time, effort and care went into that one little prop -- and by how simultaneously unsatisfying and richly rewarding this movie is. It's a strange movie, but in this case, strange is sometimes pretty wonderful.



Viewed May 12, 2018 -- Pacific Sherman Oaks 5

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