2018 was the year I began to take animation more seriously, and tried to watch all the animated movies that were released in theatres, even if I knew they would suck. From this, I ended up with a lot of surprises, such as Early Man and of course Into the Spider-Verse, but even with all of the great animated features, Hell movies in general, released in 2018, one remains my favourite of the year, Isle of Dogs, which had one of the emptiest theatres of any showing, not THE emptiest, that award goes to UglyDolls, which was dreadful, but this one was still pretty barren, and it's a shame too because it really is one of the greatest animated features I've ever seen.
In a, honestly pretty dystopic Japanese future, dogs have been banished from the island due to an outbreak, and sent to a place called "Trash Island", which is exactly as it sounds. One young boy named Atatri braves through the island of garbage to find his dog, who was the first to be sent to the island. However, there is a conspiracy going on that the mayor of the precinct had the dogs intentionally infected and desires to destroy any and all opposition, including poisoning a scientist who has found a cure for the dog disease and staging it to look like a suicide. No, this movie's plot has no ties to any current events happening currently, no government that is oppressive to any group of living beings, no pandemic sweeping the nation, none of that at all, heh heh...
Well, there's no going back now.
That aside, the movie's plot moves really well. A lot of the information of the movie is given as flashback, and I think that was a brilliant move. It means that very little is left to be exposition dumped, only what has to be. I think this movie offers a good example of something that has to be exposition dumped on the audience, the scene where Atari's dog, Spots, is explaining that he has to give up his duties. On top of brilliant moves like that, there is also a good amount of foreshadowing, and a good use of montage to cut down on the large amount of travel the characters do.
Now, I am terrible when it comes to identifying character, and it's a bit tougher here because, with the exception of the dogs and two humans, the entire cast speaks Japanese, untranslated and unsubbed. I don't think it's any surprise that I failed my highschool Japanese class.
I don't have any issue with the film being predominately Japanese, most of the important sutff is translated in some way so audiences won't be lost, and you can still get some idea of what the characters are saying. Obviously, Atari is ranting about something, or the servant is scolding him. It is also very clear that Chief is kind of the defacto leader, even though he says they're all the leader, and it's kind of amusing that the other dogs are pretty tired of him.
I must also comment that the acting is incredible in this movie. I could barely tell Jeff Goldblum, Edward Norton and Bill Murray were in this movie, and they have pretty distinct voices. I do kind of forget that these characters are dog puppets, but in the end that really is high praise to the actors.
Let's also not forget the animators, as someone who has done stop-motion animation, it takes a long time. My animations are a couple minutes long at most, so I can't imagine how long it would take to shoot a 101 minute long film. Plus there are so many little details, like paper flapping in the breeze, rats running around, and things they really did not need to animated, but did anyway to give the movie that feeling of being believable. One scene that really has to be complimented is the sushi making scene, I think fellow animated movie reviewer Animated Antic shared some behind the scenes video on how that scene was made, and it is just so smoothly done that you can only tell it's stop motion by the textures and lighting. If I had to nitpick, I will say I am not really fond of how they show any Television images in the film, they're obviously two-dimensional images, but the heads are still animated like they're three-dimensional puppets and it's really uncanny. It's kinda like watching Robot Chicken puppets interact with two-dimensional flash characters, there's a disconnect that makes it weird to look at.
Of course, there is a bit of controversy surrounding the film. Of course, since it heavily focuses on Japanese humans, there has to be some focus on their culture. Personally, I don't get it, maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the film as too bad in that regard. I think a lot of it is that we don't focus too much time on the human characters, we focus a lot on the canines, and it is clear that not all of the humans agree with the anti-dog propaganda. I feel like people are putting too much emphasis on this aspect because, it's obviously a heavily fictionalized story and it's not looking at a major aspect of Japanese culture, as far as I'm aware. I also don't think the view of "The white character saves the day is valid", she obviously didn't win at all, she was almost kicked out of the country until Atari showed up. Again, maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think this is, too bad of representation, it's better than The Aristocats... Why Paul Winchell.. why?
Honestly, it was nice to talk about a movie I love this time, especially after such a... flaming mess that was the Felix the Cat movie. This movie really is wonderful, with an engaging plot and characters, stunning animation and some of the best cinematography and background score of any movie I've ever seen. If I can steal some lines from Animated Antic's review of this movie; This is something that people who love movies should see.
It really is an incredible movie, and I really hate to think of it as a movie very few people have seen, or even as a flop. Apparently nobody is exactly sure what the budget of this movie was, but it made about 64 million at the box office, so it's clear a lot of people did see it, which is good, but I really think more people need to see it. It's a marvelous movie that is most certainly on my list of must see animated films.
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