Isle of Dogs

I was very fond of Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson's first stop-motion animated faire. Isle of Dogs less so. It's most certainly not a bad movie, but my expectations were pretty midling and, personally, they were not met.

Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole.

Now as someone with a bit of an hate/hate relationship with man’s best friend, the idea of rounding them all up and shoving them on an island where nobody needs to worry about abandoned bags of their crap littering the place up sounded quite appealing. “Atari”, however, doesn’t share my disdain for these smelly critters and so decides that he is going to try and track down his own mutt after it had been deposited onto the “Isle of Dogs”. He is the adopted son of the hereditary mayor “Kobayashi” of this Japanese community and so when his attempt to retrieve his long lost pal goes a bit awry, the authorities mobilise gadgets galore to try to return him to civilisation. Meantime he has fallen in with a disparate pack of hounds who are determined to help him find his erstwhile companion - and it’s soon a race against time before his dad plucks him back alone for some proper delousing. Of course, as he bonds with his new friends he discovers all about the deadly disease that was responsible for their incarceration in the first place and concluding that a vaccine might be in order, decides it is time to confront his old man and get these flea-ridden mongrels back marauding our streets again. This is quite possibly my favourite Wes Anderson film as it marries some quirkily effective animations with some solid characterisations and a really quite enjoyable story of curiosity, teamwork and loyalty. Along the way, there is plenty of detail from the surrounding imagery and plays on words and phrases to only thinly veil criticism of not just the not so subliminal concept of product placement itself, but of many of the products it places, too. The writing keeps the plot moving along entertainingly and though I usually don’t much like films that personify dogs (even Disney ones) this is a compact and frequently quite funny review of mankind’s attitudes to their pets. If only we put half this energy and dedication into looking out for each other! Good fun.