“Isle of Dogs” Is a Stylish Revolt Against (American) Political Madness

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“Isle of Dogs” is filled with the emotionalism of respect and principle, embodied in the dogs’ own organization and in their relationships with humans.Photograph from of Fox Searchlight / Everett

Wes Anderson’s new film “Isle of Dogs,” a comedic drama realized with stop-motion animation (like his film “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” from 2009) is both a persuasive argument for big-screen viewing and for watching at home via streaming or a disk (preferably Blu-ray). The movie is overwhelming, in the very best sense: the pointillistic profusion of the movie’s visual details—décor, action, and the gestures of the characters (all of which are puppets, deftly manipulated, frame by frame)—and, for that matter, its drolly nuanced sound mix, make a big-screen viewing a prime necessity. But that very profusion of visual details, plus the speed with which the movie’s intricate story is told, the flashes forward and back, and the quick introduction of a wide array of characters and subplots, make a first viewing merely a rough draft of an experience and invite savoring, in private, in slow motion and in freeze-frame.

“Isle of Dogs” is the third film in a virtual trilogy, following “Moonrise Kingdom” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel”—a trilogy of revolt. “Moonrise Kingdom” shows two teen-agers overturning narrow mores and narrow legalism while displaying their own inspired fusion of new and old styles (helped by a deus ex machina who is none other than God himself). In “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” a true sense of style, restraint, and pleasure functions in two ways: as both a mark of and a weapon against the depravities of a tyrannical and racist regime. With “Isle of Dogs,” Anderson looks even more closely at the victims of a radically exterminationist ruler, and, in effect, inverts the terms of “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Thrust into situations of utter degradation, places of utter ruin, and fates of utter despair, these victims unite in resisting the forces that would destroy them and, in the process, tap into a latent sensibility and forge a sublime style of their own.

The victims in “Isle of Dogs,” of course, happen to be canines. In the fictitious Japanese city of Megasaki, twenty years in the future, they are deported en masse to a fictitious offshore garbage dump, known as Trash Island, under orders from the city’s tyrannical Mayor Kobayashi (voiced by Kunichi Nomura, who co-wrote the story with Anderson, Jason Schwartzman, and Roman Coppola). (There’s a mythic backstory of the Kobayashi clan’s ancient hatred for dogs.) The pretext for that deportation is public health: the city’s canine population is widely infected with dog flu, which can be transmitted to humans, as well as with snout fever. But at the rigorously orchestrated rally at which the mayor declares his intentions, he allows, pro forma, a speaker in opposition—the scientist Watanabe, from the Science Party, who’s there with his colleague, named (and voiced by) Yoko Ono. Watanabe (voiced by Akira Ito) announces that he has nearly completed a cure for dog flu and a treatment for snout fever, but the pro-Kobayashi public filling the hall shout him down and pelt him with produce and garbage. From its basic setup, “Isle of Dogs” is a fantasy that reflects no aspect of Japanese current events but, rather, the xenophobic, racist, and demagogic strains of contemporary American politics.

The dogs on Trash Island are being left to die from malign neglect. They’re all afflicted with dog flu, and they have nothing to eat but the garbage scraps that they scavenge, and there’s little clean water to drink. The action is centered on five of them: Rex (voiced by Edward Norton), Duke (Jeff Goldblum), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray), and Chief (Bryan Cranston). What distinguishes Chief is that, unlike the other four, all former house pets, he is a stray—and, as a stray, who has led a tough life, he has no patience for his cohorts’ nostalgia for creature comforts. He girds them for a fight to survive.

Their sense of battle, however, is galvanized by the arrival of a human: the twelve-year-old Atari Kobayashi (voiced by Koyu Rankin), the mayor’s ward and distant relative, whose parents were killed in a train accident years earlier. When Atari was brought into the mayor’s home, he was given a guard dog named Spots (Liev Schreiber). To launch the anti-dog campaign, Mayor Kobayashi makes Spots the first deportee to Trash Island; but Atari secretly commandeers a small plane in the hope of rescuing Spots. The plane crash-lands, and the band of five dogs vote not to eat Atari but to rescue him—and to help him find Spots, in a mission that they know to be all but hopeless but that reaffirms their dignity and engages their righteous outrage at their persecutors.

The Japanese characters speak Japanese; their dialogue isn’t subtitled, but, rather, is frequently translated by onscreen simultaneous translators (one is voiced by Frances McDormand); the one American character speaks English; the dogs speak English. The decision not to subtitle the Japanese speakers has been criticized, as by Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times, for diminishing the prominence of the movie’s Japanese characters; yet the bulk of the dialogue is translated, and the most conspicuous non-translations, when Atari speaks to the dogs, replicates the mutual incomprehension of the species—there’s even a winking yet, in context, touching aside by one of the dogs, who, upon rescuing Atari, says, “I wish someone spoke his language.” The center of the movie is neither the Japanese characters nor the American one; it’s the canine ones. The movie looks closely at deportation, internment in a prison camp, and the threat of extermination—all from the perspective of the victims.

No contemporary director delights like Anderson does in depicting military or quasi-military organization, its somewhat ludicrous yet deeply earnest and potentially very effective rituals and hierarchies. In that regard, “Isle of Dogs” is something like Anderson’s first John Ford movie—filled with the emotionalism of respect and principle, embodied in the dogs’ own organization and in their relationships with humans. A flashback to the first encounter of Atari and Spots is an extraordinarily tender scene that’s undergirded by a self-aware, steadfast canine devotion—the very root of the action that follows. Chief is a wild dog who’s aware of his own recklessness, which presents a danger to others (and to himself—he lost his one chance at becoming a house pet when he bit a child). When he is thrust into Atari’s company, he confronts his lifelong conflict between impulses toward obedience and disobedience. When Anderson films the ruins of Trash Island, he aestheticizes and stylizes them without beautifying them, and he does the same thing with the disciplined and symmetrical order of Mayor Kobayashi’s public rallies (a Riefenstahlian twist on a contemporary American malady). Andersonian beauty is principled, passionate, liberating, and the contrast between mere order and beauty is presented nowhere more clearly in his oeuvre than in “Isle of Dogs.” (For that matter, it’s a mistake to consider Anderson’s work in animation a pursuit of total control: the director’s work with his animators involves vast amounts of back-and-forth, of attempts and suggestions, variations and surprises; their personal and physical involvement, even if offscreen, is no less vital to the film than the presence of actors in a live-action movie.)

There’s another character who’s crucial to the resistance to Mayor Kobayashi’s reign of terror: an American foreign-exchange student named Tracy Walker (Greta Gerwig), who is the only white student in her class in Megasaki Senior High. I was at first surprised that Anderson would cast a white foreigner as the central figure in the political liberation of Megasaki City, but Tracy’s presence—virtually inviting the xenophobic wrath of the demagogic ruler—meshes with the parallels that Anderson develops with current American politics. The connection becomes even clearer when—not to give away too much—Mayor Kobayashi is revealed to be a kleptocrat whose policies are driven by his business interests. What’s more, the climactic line that unleashes the movie’s dénouement is Tracy’s interruption of Mayor Kobayashi’s campaign rally with the cry, “He’s stealing the reëlection!” (The suggestion that citizens of the future Megasaki City seem passive in the face of tyranny could, to an outside observer, hold quite as well here, now.)

For Anderson, Japan is a sort of mirror-America, a country that has as prominent, as rich, and as inspiring a cinematic image, due to its movie industry and to the artists whom it sustained; the Japan of “Isle of Dogs” is a movie-made place. “Isle of Dogs” doesn’t draw upon Japanese history, doesn’t delve into Japanese politics, doesn’t consider the present-day specifics of Japanese society. The movie’s future-Japan (a future that is decoratively imbued, Anderson-style, with industrial styles and technological devices of the fifties and sixties) is akin to the fictitious Central European country of Zubrowka in “Grand Budapest,” which is as much a movie creation—a reference to films by Ernst Lubitsch and other nineteen-thirties filmmakers—as is the futuristic-dystopian Japan of “Isle of Dogs.” Even the geography of Japan is fictitious (it includes the so-called Middle Finger Islands which the dogs must cross in order to reach the distant Cuticles). The film’s political references have nothing to do with real-life Japan, either; they’re heralded very early on, in the voice-over narration (by Courtney B. Vance) that refers to “the Japanese archipelago,” a word that instantly resounds not with Japanese history but with exposés of Soviet prison camps.

The movie’s Japan resembles Zubrowka in another way: like Lubitsch’s comedies of manners, the movies of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, and others show a society in which the expression of emotion is modulated through conventional hints, deflections, and indirections. The iconography of Japan, as represented copiously in Japanese movies, art, and architecture reflects a culture of shared formalities. The demagogy of Mayor Kobayashi (like the ultimate villainy of his henchman, the Major-Domo Hatchet-Man, voiced by Akira Takayama) stands out all the more for saying and doing, with disruptive ferocity, what few in his position would be likely to express publicly. (Here, too, Japan is a stand-in for current-day America.) But the virtues of mutually respected formalities emerge in a sort of epilogue, when Mayor Kobayashi publicly admits (in a gesture virtually unimaginable in American public life), “I have no honor,” and makes a vast offering in repentance. (No spoilers; it’s not seppuku but a brilliantly conceived, humanistic, life-giving substitute.)

As ever in Anderson’s work, there’s a powerful strain of romanticism in “Isle of Dogs,” both in the portrayal of the uprising (the lonely three-tone whistle that serves as the dogs’ sign of recognition, the abandoned Spots’s Chaplinesque stare into camera) and in matters of actual romance (two involving dogs and one involving a teen or tween crush). I confess that I was surprised by the gender separation of dogs on Trash Island—the only prominent female dogs, Nutmeg (Scarlett Johansson) and Peppermint (Kara Hayward), aren’t fighters. Nutmeg is a former show dog (though she tells Chief, “That’s what I do, it’s not my identity”), deft and dainty. Peppermint, a survivor of a distant, woeful camp of experimentation on animals, is also slender and domestic. The martial masculinity of the movie’s band of fighting dogs is an aesthetic holdover—a reference to a cinematic and literary heritage that is receiving long-overdue critiques in Hollywood today, but Anderson seems to replicate it unquestioningly. Given the central place of misogyny in the current American strain of political madness, and the clarity and force of the movie’s allegory of rage at that madness, that absence is all the more gaping.