Isle of Dogs presents, without a hint of irony, an American filmmaker’s fiction about the horrors of an internment camp set up by the Japanese government. Wes Anderson’s latest film, set in Japan in the 2030’s, is a stop-motion animation about the dastardly, anti-dog Kobayashi dynasty and its attempts to rid the fictional city of Megasaki of its four-legged friends. The hybrid product of the director’s dual desires to create something “about some dogs abandoned on a garbage dump”, and also “do something in Japan”, the film blends Anderson’s trademark whimsical storytelling and dioramic scenery with an attempted homage to Japanese culture and tradition. The result is a quaint tale about the courage of society’s (literal) underdogs, transposed alongside a clumsy and awkward tribute to Japanese culture that teeters between heartfelt sincerity and appropriative hipster aestheticism – unfortunately, Isle of Dogs too often falls into the latter category.
After Kobayashi, the conniving mayor of Megasaki, orders all the city’s dogs to be quarantined on the nearby ‘Trash Island’ – a dilapidated, post-apocalyptic island filled with decomposing garbage, scurrying rats, and abandoned fairground rides – dogs such as the grizzly stray Chief (voiced by Bryan Cranston), eminently loyal Rex (Ed Norton) and pristinely-coated show dog Nutmeg (Scarlett Johansson) are left to struggle for their bare survival. They soon witness a small plane crash onto their island: this is flown by the dog-loving 12-year-old Atari (Koyu Rankin). Atari has landed to find and rescue his beloved friend and ‘dog bodyguard’ Spots (Liev Schreiber). A dog-hunt for Spots takes place on Trash Island alongside a concurrent manhunt for Atari in Megasaki, punctuated with stories of unscrupulous politicians, principled scientists, and a pro-dog resistance led by American exchange student Tracy Walker (Greta Gerwig).
The critical reception to Isle of Dogs has come in several waves. At its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, the film was received with rapturous praise, winning Anderson the prize for Best Director. Critics particularly praised the film’s technical prowess with stop-motion animation, and the lurid (and at times absurd) imagination underlying Anderson’s storytelling. The question of the film’s homage to Japanese culture was treated fairly ambivalently. The “American exchange student Tracy”, writes Guy Lodge in Variety, “skates a little too close to white-savior territory in a film that some will already have placed on thin ice for its ornate cherry-blossom-picking of Japanese culture and iconography”, but argues that “there’s subjective leeway in the argument over appreciation versus appropriation”. At the Guardian, Jonathan Romney asserts that the film “could have come across as shameless cultural tourism… but the film suggests real immersion in Japanese culture and cinema”.
A second wave of criticism, however, saw the truth out of the Telegraph’s early prediction that “the leaning on archetypes… across a whole range of Japanese art forms, are manoeuvres certain to get Anderson in hot water once the film is more widely seen” – and although one might wonder why it would require a film to be more ‘widely seen’ in order for mainstream critics to examine said film’s homage to Japan more critically, I have a hunch. Among these new critics included Alison Willmore of Buzzfeed, who observed that Isle of Dogs treated Asian culture “not as a living, breathing half of the planet but as a mirror for the Western imagination” while Justin Chang of the LA Times questioned the impact of leaving out subtitles for the film’s Japanese dialogue, leaving most English language and international audiences to rely on the Greta Gerwig’s Tracy and the dogs, voiced by Hollywood’s leading celebrities, for cultural interpretation and understanding.
Isle of Dogs is ultimately a movie about a Japan contained within the American imagination, offering a cultural ‘homage’ that resembles something a white 18-year-old gamer with a poster of Sailor Moon in his room might produce if he suddenly became very skilled at stop-motion animation. There are sumo wrestlers, writhing octopi entrails, and a meek scientist named Yoko Ono (voiced by Yoko Ono). The nefarious, dog-hating Mayor Kobayashi prepares to unleash a toxin called ‘wasabi poison’ on the canines on Trash Island. It is an easy pastiche of Japan made from the position of the Western imagination, peppered with some nods to film legends Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki. Additionally, the placement of the movie in Japan’s ‘near future’ absolves Anderson from the necessity to engage with empirical realities of contemporary Japanese social and political life.
Anderson himself has attested that the Japan in Isle of Dogs has little to do with the actual Japan of today. It is a Japan of his imagination, the result of the director’s predilection for building meta-real universes composed of postmodern pastiches and carefully curated signifiers. In some ways, it is comparable to the meta-real world-building of The Grand Budapest Hotel, drenched in Eastern European nostalgia, or the romanticised New England of the 1960’s of Moonrise Kingdom. Culture, in Anderson’s storytelling, often assumes a decorative function, a useful sugary backdrop on which to place a narrative suspended from the demands of time, place, and the mundanity of everyday life – of the Isle of Dogs, the director noted “could have taken place really anywhere”.
This relentless drive to aestheticise the world as it is in order to create new, more beautiful meta-realities does not warrant denunciation in of itself, but it begs the question: who is this art for? Only a certain class of individuals can have a limitless appetite for self-referential, world-denying twee. Anderson cherrypicks the bits of culture he likes and then uses these curated selections to give his film a worldly, quirky, and decidedly apolitical sheen. This is the art of the invariably white, bookish, and upper-class – if The New Yorker went vintage shopping and turned into a movie. The result is a beautifully decorated story, but dig around deeper and you’ll find that there’s nothing much else there.
Isle of Dogs is less interesting as a movie, and more compelling as an example of the apolitical provincialism of the white, pseudo-cosmopolitan hipsterdom endemic to Brooklyn, Art Basel, and your average private art school. It is a worldview that positions itself as the ne plus ultra of an urbane sort of worldliness – we do summers in Rome, and winters in the Alps! – but nevertheless approaches culture as a series of easily identifiable, commodifiable signifiers with which to furnish one’s personal brand. Anderson himself is an impressive weaver of tall tales and an impeccable aesthete. But in Isle of Dogs, he faces the contradictory task of squaring his trademark affected disaffection from above with sincere cultural homage from below; the result is a slightly confused, somewhat enjoyable, but mostly infuriating, romp through a postmodern, meta-real Japan of one man’s imagination.
