Isle of Dogs

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ½

“Rushmore” was the first Wes Anderson film I saw and I have seen every single full-length film he’s made since then. They are almost always great films and some of them (“The Royal Tenenbaums,” “Moonrise Kingdom”) are brilliant. This film is one of his best. “Isle of Dogs” (read “I Love Dogs”) takes place in an alternate universe where Japan is ruled by the cat-loving Kobayashi family. Mayor Kobayashi has hatched a plan to send all of the dogs to a garbage dump island off the coast from Megasaki, the city he runs. His nephew then goes to the island looking for his displaced dog and therein lies the story. The dogs’ barks have all been “translated” into English, while the humans speak in mostly untranslated Japanese. We are aligned with the dogs and, like them, have no idea what the humans are saying, just as they don’t understand the dogs. It’s a clever conceit that mostly works, though Anderson does have to find creative ways for the audience to understand enough human speech to move the plot along. Anderson is beloved (just look at the list of starts in the tags under the film’s title in this review). He is the master of beautiful, odd, quirky, endearing stories and this film is all of that in droves. The visual images in this stop-motion film are truly stunning. Scene after scene, I was captured by the beauty and attention to detail. The characters are all charming, funny and lovable in a very Anderson sort of way. At his heart, Anderson is an optimist about human beings; he believes in our basic goodness and that, underneath all of our weirdness, we all want to connect. That very sweet notion infuses his films. Here, dogs are metaphors for the best parts of us: loyalty, bravery, sacrifice, love. Beyond just a cute story, Anderson is playing with far deeper issues. At times, the story works as a (sometimes heavy-handed) metaphor for fascism and the importance of resistance against tyranny. But its real strength comes when it sticks with the broader themes of love and connection. When “Isle of Dogs” takes us there, it is as charming a film as you’ll see all year.