Isle of Dogs

Full disclosure: I like dogs. Dogs are obedient and loving. Sometimes I wonder, are they loving or just extremely tolerant? Then my dog is happy to see me when the rest of the world would have been perfectly fine with me staying under the Garrison Street Bridge with my cough syrup and half a bottle of Rumchat, and I know it’s love. Dogs are far more likely to judge you for how you smell than for your character flaws. Take a mass murderer, strip him naked and smother him in peanut butter and dogs won’t shun him. People will. People have too much baggage, too much, “Oh, that guy shot my mother so I don’t like him.”

I can’t tell you the number of times I have been so shamed by strangers that I began to agree I was an unlovable asshole. I remember this time an old man shat himself in the Golden Corral. That happens all the time, but most people keep quiet. They hunker down in their booths, maybe occasionally commenting loud that something smells in an effort to misdirect attention. They send the kids to get more Jell-O and wet wipes from the rib station. This old man, though, he perused the salad bar dripping his wet load onto the linoleum.

That night was the Mrs. and my anniversary and I wanted everything to be perfect, which is why I chose a place as nice as Golden Corral, and as cheap as Golden Corral (since she was paying). I took it upon myself to politely suggest that this gentleman should head to the bathroom because he was making me fucking sick and I thought I might puke into the chocolate fountain.

Apparently Golden Corral people look out for their own, and I had just crossed some line of unspoken etiquette. YOU DO NOT CALL OUT THE GUY WHO SHIT HIMSELF IN GOLDEN CORRAL. Men scowled at me while their children flipped me off. Women with mustaches in trucker hats made it clear I was subhuman garbage, not worthy of being around their children while they sneezed into the chocolate fountain. The old man cried.

I felt lousy. I left Mrs. Filthy at the restaurant to get her fill of fried chicken and sheet cake while I went home, stripped naked, got out the tub of Peter Pan and let my best friend remind me that I wasn’t unlovable. I was a friend. I had a friend. Also, if you close your eyes and you’re super drunk you can almost convince yourself it’s not a dog that’s licking your balls. Or, at least, it’s not your own dog.

I tell you this mainly because my deep-seated insecurity and abject loneliness force me to share things I shouldn’t in a desperate attempt to make some meaningful connection with someone, anyone. Also, to let you know I probably had a bias going into Wes Anderson’s new movie, the stop-motion animation Isle of Dogs. Get it? It sounds like “I Love Dogs.” Which is what the movie is: another love letter to canines.

The movie is about four-legged companions, their loyalty, their kindness and how they just fucking love us humans. They’ve been bred for millenniums to do just that. In light of the sheer volume of good dog movies, Isle of Dogs not great, not like Old Yeller or Homeward Bound. It’s not shit either, like the schmaltzy Air Bud movies that just exploit dog lovers. Still, it covers the same ground of good companions who would do anything for their masters. It’s less sentimental and stilted by Anderson’s affectations and love for staging over characters. Still, it’s about good dogs.

The dogs are mostly voiced by Anderson’s revolving cast, including Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Edward Norton, Jeff Goldblum, Frances McDormand, as well as Scarlett Johannson, Greta Gerwig and Bryan Cranston. Lots of great character actors asked to portray dogs without much character.

The corrupt mayor of the Japanese city of Megasaki comes from a long line of cat-loving rulers, and he has banned all dogs to die on Trash Island, which is exactly as it sounds. It’s a literal dump. On the island, the dogs develop their own society, a sort of Lord of the Flies for canines. But it’s a melancholy life. Without masters to love and be loved by, the dogs are lost. Sort of like that weekend that Mrs. Filthy had a button and zipper convention in Philadelphia and left me forty dollars for food. I was rich as fuck, drunk as one of those Indian monkeys that eats fermented fruit, but utterly adrift.

An orphan named Atari (Koyu Rankin) misses his dog Spots so much that he steals a plane and flies to the island to get him back. The abandoned dogs help him, including Chief (Bryan Cranston), who initially does not want to because he considers himself a stray and loyal to nobody. What follows is a journey across Trash Island led by the dogs, eager to please and serve the first human they see, and during which Chief learns to trust and love the boy. Meanwhile, on the mainland, there are all sorts of political machinations to ensure dogs never come back, with a young exchange student (Gerwig) trying to expose the corruption.

At its core, Isle of Dogs is the simple story of a boy and a dog overcoming hardships and obstacles to reunite. It’s all weighted, though, with Anderson’s frippery, as though the story had to get the approval of some guy with Asperger’s who has a massive model railroad setup. He wants all his favorite details in there: the working amusement park, the miniature gondola, the glowing coke bottle house, ad so on. The stop-motion is amusing for a while. The sets are impeccable and rich with detail that caused me to stop every few seconds and marvel at how many people probably must have kept track of every fake hair strand and piece of trash blowing in the wind for every frame.

All that shit can be a burden, though, especially when the emotional arc gets buried under the details. There are robot dogs, incinerators, drones, fancy labs, a rival for mayor with a cure for the dogs’ snout fever and dog romances. Most of that is tangential, though, and the time and detail spent confuse the viewer into mistaking their importance. Like the railroad built by the guy with Asperger’s, it’s cool to look at for a little while but then dark thoughts creep in about how much fucking time it all took, and was there something better that could have been done with that time? Specifically, could the story have been richer? Could the characters alongside all the whiz-band miniatures have been more than simplistic? Dogs are simplistic, which is why we love them. But when anthropomorphized, they should be more than one word descriptors, such as persistent, honorable, corrupt. They should be interesting.

Visuals are awesome when they are in service of a story, but here the plot is just a clothesline upon which Anderson can hang all his lovely laundry. He loves miniatures, he loves whimsy, but that sort of shit does not a great movie make. Isle of Dogs is great visuals for 100 minutes and a mediocre story for fifty. Three Fingers.