Isle of Dogs (2018)
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Isle of Dogs Movie Review
Isle of Dogs is a 2018 stop-motion animated adventure comedy film directed by Wes Anderson. It is another unappealing film from this frustrating director.
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“We’ll find him. Wherever he is,
if he’s alive, we’ll find your dog“
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The film is set in dystopian future Japan where a group of dogs helps a young boy search for his dog. Because of canine flu, the whole dog species is sent away to one island. So basically the film is stop-motion animated, it’s set in Japan and it revolves around dogs. And when you have such a perfect mix of everything I love and I still end up disliking the film, it’s clear that Anderson is not for me as he ruined what otherwise could have been an intriguing movie.
So as an adventure, it mostly fails as it is slow paced, filled with a lot of detours and never particularly exciting, not to mention rarely engaging. It’s really quite a boring film. In terms of comedy, it is even worse. The humor is so weak that I never laughed, not even once. The film is incredibly pretentious along with being overly quirky, weird and simply unappealing in its style and approach.
Chief is the only somewhat memorable character with an interesting story and personality. All of the others are entirely underutilized and annoying. The humans are quite forgettable and distant and the dogs are actually portrayed in a very weird way which mixes human with their canine behavior. And it honestly didn’t work for me at all as the filmmakers should have chosen one of those and stuck with the one.
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By far the most terrible aspect in Isle of Dogs is the voice acting. I honestly was baffled as to how these talented people (Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Bill Murray and so on) sound so horrible here. They have such unlikable, pretentious, simply bad voices that they took me out of the movie completely. The same should be said for the director’s decision to not translate the Japanese dialogue. That move was simply stupid no matter what anyone else says and it made the movie even more distant and difficult to get into.
Isle of Dogs is a mediocre, not bad movie, because it does obviously have a couple of positives. Let’s talk about those now. The animation is good. I wouldn’t say great because the style is also difficult to get into and adore, but I would still say it’s rather stylistic, polished and even charming at times. The character design is also solid. But the standout is the world building which is actually terrific and the best reason to see this film. The world is so well imagined and the film seems epic and particularly impressive in its attention to detail.
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But other than those, the score is weaker and the direction from Wes Anderson is horrible. He is simply not for me, his style does not suit my sensibilities and here he even felt pretentious to me. Thematically speaking, the movie did not have much new to say about dogs and thus ‘Lady and the Tramp’ is a much better version of its middle section which has some endearing scenes and is the highlight of the film. The first and last act are quite bad in comparison. So in the end, ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ was definitely a better Anderson animated film.
Can you have a stop-motion animated film set in Japan that revolves around dogs that isn’t great? Isle of Dogs proves that yes, you absolutely can. This is a film which does have a solid middle section and terrific world building, but everything else is quite bad. It’s another highly unappealing Wes Anderson movie which I could never get into how boring its characters are, how pretentious the story is and how horrible and irritating the characters’ voices sound. I also found the decision to not translate the Japanese dialogue baffling as it made the film even more cold and distant.
