Animated 'Isle of Dogs' rates a big bow-WOW!
“Isle of Dogs” - ★ ★ ★ ★
Wes Anderson's eerily politically prescient, stop-motion black comedy “Isle of Dogs” ranks as the most innovative animated feature since “Toy Story.” And then some.
This wry, sly, stunningly stylized political parable went into production a month before the 2016 election.
No way could filmmakers have known that Donald Trump would win the presidency and later call for the deportation of illegal aliens.
And yet, “Isle of Dogs” tells the story of an autocratic Japanese leader who convinces a panicked public that “diseased” dogs pose such a threat to society that they all must be exiled to an island of trash. Cats don't care.
No way could filmmakers have known that American students in 2018 would rise up en masse to challenge the politics of their elected public officials.
And yet, “Isle of Dogs” shows us students on a high school newspaper picking up the journalistic ball dropped by the main news media.
Anderson, fulfilling the promise of his auspicious 2009 stop-motion animated comedy “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” taps the iconic works of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa as a primary inspiration to bring this magical cast of handmade puppets to life - without the fingerprints commonly seen on those stop-motion Aardman characters.
The thuggish mayor of the city Megasaki, named Kobayashi (voiced by screenwriter Kunichi Nomura and resembling longtime Kurosawa collaborator Toshiro Mifune), whips the public into a frenzy by using an outbreak of dog flu to gain power, even though the disease so far doesn't affect humans and his Science Party political opponent Professor Watanabe (Akira Ito) is on the verge of a creating a vaccine.
The mayor's own bodyguard dog Spots (Liev Schreiber) becomes the first canine to be dumped on Trash Island. Soon, all of Megasaki's dogs join him, among them the know-it-all Duke (Jeff Goldblum), baseball mascot Boss (Anderson regular Bill Murray), nostalgic Rex (Edward Norton), dog food spokesmutt King (Bob Balaban) and the mangy maverick Chief (Bryan Cranston).
The plot kicks in when a 12-year-old boy named Atari (Koyu Rankin), the mayor's nephew, crashes his small plane on Trash Island. He has come to find his dog, Spots, presumed dead. Atari recruits Chief and the other dogs to search for his beloved pet, setting off a spectacular quest through a dumping ground of despair.
An impressive all-star cast (including Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand, Scarlett Johansson, Harvey Keitel and others) supplies the personalities to Anderson's well-drawn characters (created by writers Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Kunichi Nomura).
The comically quirky “Isle of Dogs” comes with Japanese and English subtitles, plus all canine barks are translated for us in a story so timely, it includes the political poisoning of a change agent that mirrors the recent attempted assassination of a former Russian spy in Great Britain.
Cats, of course, will still not care.
<b>Starring:</b> Koyu Rankin, Bryan Cranston, Liev Schreiber, Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Edward Norton, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand, Yoko Ono, Harvey Keitel, Tilda Swinton, Courtney B. Vance
<b>Directed by:</b> Wes Anderson
<b>Other:</b> A Fox Searchlight Pictures release. Rated PG-13 for violence. 101 minutes