Isle of Dogs

Official Australian release date: 12/4/18. Viewed: 14/4/18.

Director: Wes Anderson

Actors: Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Koyu Rankin, Bill Murray

Genre: Comedy / Adventure

Rating: PG

  

‘Isle of Dogs’ is another animated/puppet Wes Anderson film, a la ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ and his 9^th film overall. Needless to say, it’s quirky and offbeat. The plot is quite simple: Megasaki in Japan is divided into dog-haters and dog-lovers, and the mayor exiles all dogs to an island/dump across the bay. Atari (Rankin), a 12-year-old boy, then sets off to rescue his dog, Spots (Schreiber). The main characters are a pack of talking dogs – Chief (Cranston), Rex (Norton), Boss (Murray), Duke (Goldblum) and King (Balaban).

Even though it’s stop-motion animation/puppetry, it’s not really a kids film. It must have just scraped a PG instead of an M. There’s certainly some rather grim moments and gallows humour. It takes a while to build momentum and fully immerse you in the story – the final third is much better than the rest of the film. There’s probably too much drumming in the score – it becomes distracting, as does the lack of subtitles for the bits spoken in Japanese.

It’s certainly not a bad film, but nowhere near as fun as ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ or ‘Moonrise Kingdom’. The puppetry is pretty amazing, even though they sometimes look like action figures in close up, but the animation and some of the landscape shots are expertly done. There’s a million cuts, as is Anderson’s style, and too many characters, so no one gets a true chance to shire.

Overall: OK, but missing Anderson’s typical whimsy.

Gav's Rating: 3 stars.