Isle of Dogs is Wes Anderson’s lightweight love letter to Japanese cinema (and dogs)

First things first: Say “isle of dogs” aloud. Say it again. Listen closely. Do you hear it?

Okay, we can move on.

Isle of Dogs, writer-director Wes Anderson’s second fully stop-motion-animated offering (after 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox), is a diverting, if lightweight, concoction. People tend to either love or shrug their shoulders at Anderson’s signature style, and while I fall into the latter camp, even I found Isle of Dogs mostly fun.

But Isle of Dogs, though carefully crafted, doesn’t have much to say — and that’s what’s frustrating about the movie. Anderson has always been one of the most stylistically distinctive American directors, but at times it’s felt as if his fussiness was a way to wallpaper over a lack of new narrative ideas. Isle of Dogs doesn’t suggest an evolution.

Still, what Anderson does with Isle of Dogs will delight his fans and maybe win him some new ones. Just don’t expect it to say anything too profound: Despite its feint toward commentary, in Isle of Dogs, the concept of xenophobia is just a plot device, not a matter for serious discussion.

What’s most noticeable off the bat is that Isle of Dogs is Anderson’s love letter to Japanese cinema, in particular the films of Akira Kurosawa (keep an ear out for the Seven Samurai theme), though sharp-eyed cinephiles will likely spot many other reference points.

That Anderson finds inspiration in the work of many Japanese directors isn’t all that surprising, given how he favors precision and symmetry. In this film, he’s taken it further, drawing on Japanese styles of theater, illustration, and storytelling for a tale about a pack of dogs and a little boy in search of a place to belong.

How you feel about the film’s employment of Japanese culture likely depends on how well you feel Anderson succeeds at paying homage to those films rather than just using them for his own devices. I think it sometimes succeeds — largely because the film makes the choice to have most of its Japanese characters speak in Japanese, sometimes with an interpreter (voiced by Frances McDormand), and sometimes without.

For a non-Japanese speaker like myself, the effect is frequently more like watching an intermittently subtitled foreign language film than a movie overly enamored with a culture it finds exotic.

But the movie isn’t all in Japanese, of course. The dogs of Isle of Dogs, we’re informed early on, have had their barks transliterated into English, and they’re brought to life by a cornucopia of talent, most notably a pack of five dogs voiced by Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Bob Balaban, Bill Murray, and Jeff Goldblum.

They, along with all the rest of the dogs, have been banished by the mayor of the fictional Japanese city of Megasaki, Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura). While seeking reelection, Kobayashi declares that the flu that’s been afflicting the canine population threatens to cross over to the human population, and though a scientist named Professor Watanabe (Akira Ito) says he can solve the flu with a serum inside of six months, Kobayashi opts to banish the dog population to an island made of trash, beginning with his own dog, Spots Kobayashi.

Spots’ master is Kobayashi’s own distant nephew, Atari (Koyu Rankin), who was orphaned after an accident in his childhood and adopted by the mayor. Atari is heartbroken at the loss of Spots and, though he’s only 12, pilots a small plane to Trash Island to find his dog. That’s where he meets the pack of dogs, who set out on their mission.

There is a lot of plot packed into this movie: In addition to the dogs’ quest, there’s are side plots involving a conspiracy uncovered by a white high school exchange student named Tracy Walker (Greta Gerwig), a pack of robot dogs, and the tragic tale of Watanabe and his assistant, Assistant Scientist Yoko-ono (who is actually voiced by Yoko Ono). Scarlett Johansson, Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Liev Schreiber, Ken Watanabe, Courtney B. Vance, Roman Coppola, Anjelica Huston, and a bevy of others also contribute voice talent.

Within all that plotting, though, the dogs are reliably the best part. Animated with immense attention to detail, they’re proof that Anderson does not, as some have speculated, hate dogs. (Perhaps the title is his subtle rebuttal.) Rather, he finds them fascinating, with personalities of their own. In Isle of Dogs, most of those personalities are expressed through one clear trait — the funniest of which might be Oracle, a bug-eyed pug voiced by Tilda Swinton, who can “predict” the future because she watches TV.

But while that’s a funny way to quickly paint a character, it also makes for shallow characterizations, a problem that also extends to the humans in this movie, including Atari and Tracy, who are essentially one-note characters. The only complex character is Cranston’s Chief, who was a stray back in Megasaki but slowly comes to understand loyalty and love on his journey.

But by the end of Isle of Dogs, that shallow characterization and the ping-pong plot make the film feel like a missed opportunity. There are seeds of interesting stuff here, and bringing up xenophobia and mistreatment in the context of an American film that borrows heavily on Japanese culture feels like it certainly is meant to say something.

And yet Isle of Dogs chases its tail and says nothing, which is a problem all its own. By the end, it hits all the traditional Andersonian notes: the outsider finding a place to belong, the misfits falling in love, the pieces falling into place. But it feels like a cover song, a repetition of his other movies, with little new to offer except an imported coat of paint.

That’s probably plenty for Anderson fans who find something captivating in those repeated notes. But there was possibility for substance to arise from Isle of Dogs’ ocean-crossing style — and unfortunately, it feels like it was buried under a heap of aesthetic allusions and recycled beats.

Isle of Dogs opens in limited release on March 23, 2018.