With stop-motion animation Isle of Dogs, Wes Anderson may have made his most political film yet
Mercurial director’s latest tale about a group of dogs, banished to a refuse-strewn island, is an appreciation of classic Japanese cinema and a subtle reflection on how fear governs politics today
“Fleas, ticks, lice, rats, mangy birds … that is a sentence on the first page of the notes,” says Wes Anderson.
The American writer-director is sifting back through his mind to the very first seeds of his latest movie, stop-motion animation Isle of Dogs. The story of a group of canines, banished to a refuse-strewn island off the coast of a dystopian near-future Japan, it’s a typically offbeat premise from the director of The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Royal Tenenbaums.
Anderson initially started kicking ideas around with filmmaker Roman Coppola and actor Jason Schwartzman (with whom he co-wrote 2007’s Indian odyssey The Darjeeling Limited).
“I think Roman and I felt like the joy was trying to figure out what Wes was feeling and to look for it with him and find the story together,” says Schwartzman, who first worked with Anderson on his sophomore breakthrough movie, 1998’s Rushmore.
Out of the strangest of premises, Isle of Dogs grew into a love letter to Japan. It begins with an outbreak of a potentially harmful virus spread by the canine population. Kobayashi, the cat-loving mayor of the (fictional) Megasaki City, decrees that all dogs – pets or otherwise – be shipped off to the bleak Trash Island, among them Boss (voiced by Bill Murray), Chief (Bryan Cranston), Duke (Jeff Goldblum) and Rex (Edward Norton).
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The obvious comparison might be Tashirojima, the famous island populated by cats that lies off the Oshika Peninsula in Japan.