Wes Anderson, 2018, Germany, Japan, USA, UK, Colour, 101 mins, Certificate: PG
Are you in awe of Anderson’s cinema (Rushmor, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel), or are you still wondering what the fuss is about? Do you love dogs, or cats? Both, or neither?
Are you fascinated by the Japanese culture and iconography, or do you adhere to strictly Western affairs? Are you so well versed in the work of some of Japan’s great filmmakers, such as Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu and Hayao Miyazaki that you can easily pick up references to their films, or you have no idea what I am talking about?
Are you into (stop motion) animation, or do you regard it as something strictly for kiddies? Can you accept it and cinema in general as forms of -at times high- art?
Are you interested in what may stir beneath the gorgeous surface (musings on the environmental crisis, on the fear of the Other, on the alternative facts and fake news of
tyrannical, racist and misogynistic regimes, and on the ever timely aphorism “divided we fall, united we stand”), or do you only take cinema at face, entertaining value?
Yes or no, whatever the answer, it doesn’t matter. This genre-bending, multi-award winning, dystopian comedy about a boy’s odyssey in search of his lost dog will have you at hello.
“… the unique charm of
Isle of Dogs is its bottomless vault of curios, its sly humor, playful graphic inserts and dexterous narrative detours. ”
David Rooney,
The Hollywood Reporter“So lush with gorgeous detail it’s like a piece of highly-textured haute couture, there’s also a sharp social message behind the elaborate seams: the dogs are starving, filthy, diseased and quarantined, and only the orphan boy remembers who man’s best friend really is.”
Fionnuala Halligan,
Screen Daily“The worse things get, the more fantastical Anderson’s films become; the more fantastical Anderson’s films become, the better their style articulates his underlying sincerity. Disorder fuels his imagination, and the staggeringly well-crafted “
Isle of Dogs” is nothing if not Anderson’s most imaginative film to date.”
David Ehrlich, IndieWire“… buried in amongst the surprisingly potent political commentary (the clash between demagogues and experts; the limits of democracy when decisiveness is needed; the value of journalism in the age of propagandist “fake news”) there is a further undercurrent about the value of outsider perspectives, and how much better we are when we blur the lines.”
Jessica Kiang,
The Playlist