Isle of Dogs movie review: Wes Anderson packs this magnificent, complex tale with intoxicating imagery

If a film is directed by Wes Anderson, there’s no need to read any review or column to decide whether or not to watch it. You just head to the nearest theater to experience the very high order of art that Anderson creates. This time he does so with stop motion animation in the wonderful and enchanting Isle of Dogs.

Anderson sets the film in a futuristic dystopia of Japan where a flu is affecting the population of dogs; the canines are banished to an island by the dictatorial mayor Kobayashi. The dogs are then left to their own devices, forced to create their own society on the trashy island. A dog named Spots (Live Schreiber) goes missing and his friend Atari (Koyu Rankin) goes on a mission to search for him, going so far as to crash land on the island and recruit a bunch of other dogs like Rex (Edward Norton), Chief (Bryan Cranston), Boss (Bill Murray), Duke (Jeff Goldblum), and King (Bob Balaban). As the charmingly sophisticated dogs’ mission is underway, on the human side of things, the mayor’s rule is under threat by a quiet revolution led by a school kid named Tracy (Greta Gerwig) who is investigating the mysterious case of a scientist who seemingly committed suicide while on the verge of finding a cure for the dog flu.

As you expect from an Anderson film, the imagery is absolutely intoxicating, a swirl of intricately designed sets and eye popping colours, with the quietly manic energy that Anderson often infuses in his work. This is the closest a film has come to resembling reading a story book, the exuberant heightened reality of the world the film is set in colliding with breathtaking dedication to all things Japan, interspersed in densely layered old school fable and post modern allegory. This is a magical adventure, but it’s also filled with pockets of emotion small enough to be swayed away by — until the next frenetic adventure kicks in. It’s also a melancholy film, perhaps the gloomiest Anderson has made to date but it’s also got his trademark razor-sharp bone-dry wit and a strange balance between apparent simplicity and elaboration, making way for a kind of a yearning for the light in the darkness.

If Isle of Dogs ultimately defies anyone’s ability to describe it in a sentence it’s just a testament to its magnificent strength as a complex tale presented as a children’s film. Some might consider the film as a little too dark and scary for kids but they forget that kids love to be scared. If there’s myth and magic for kids there’s social commentary and absurdist humour for adult connoisseurs of animated cinema. Considering the sheer power of the visuals Isle of Dogs is a fairly understated film that deserves to reach a wider audience, if only to remind us how far storytelling can be executed in the animation genre and how a singular viewing could change you as a person. It’s released in India with very few shows, if you support this kind of cinema you’d only be rewarded with more of these in cinema screens.