Wes Anderson's Best Movie?- Isle of Dogs - Film Review

Isle of Dogs is directed by Wes Anderson and stars literally everybody.

Plot
When all the dogs of Megasaki City are exiled to a vast garbage-dump called Trash Island, 12-year-old Atari (Koyu Rankin) sets off alone in a small plane and flies across the river in search of his bodyguard-dog, Spots (Liev Schrieber). There, with the assistance of pack of dogs, Chief (Bryan Cranston), Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray), and Duke (Jeff Goldblum), he begins an epic journey that will decide the fate and future of the entire Prefecture.

Review
I saw this movie yesterday, but I didn't finish the review until today.

Isle of Dogs... If you say the title fast enough, it sounds like I Love Dogs.

This is the sixth Wes Anderson film I've seen, the others were Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I just wacthed today. I actually don't remember much about Moonrise Kingdom because I saw it once a few years ago. I watched Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Life Aquatic this year.

And yes, I think this is the best movie Wes Anderson has made, I would like to see Fantastic Mr. Fox to see how he's improved at doing animation.

But yeah, this movie is great and has lots of great and emotional moments, like when (spoilers) Atari finds a dog skeleton and thinks it was his dog Spots, but it turns out it was a different dog. There's also the scene where Chief replaces Spots as Atari's dog because he was having puppies with another dog.

This film is just amazing. Please watch this movie if you are a Wes Anderson fan. Chances are, if you are a Wes Anderson fan, then you have probably seen this already.

The animation is beautiful in this movie. I wouldn't be surprised if they used dog fur for the puppets, I don't know if they did, but if they did then it looks great.

Wes Anderson said that his inspirations for the movie include the films of Akria Kurosawa and the stop motion holiday specials made by Rankin/Bass. Most people usually don't think of Akira Kurosawa and then think of Rudolph afterwards, but Wes Anderson is unlike most people so he put them together. There are two of Wes Anderson's films that use stop motion that I could think of: There's Fantastic Mr. Fox of course, and there's also The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou that uses it for the fish.

It does have some funny moments, like when Chief, Rex, King, Boss, and Duke face off with another gang of dogs over food in a garbage bag and Rex says that they should see what's in the bag before deciding if it's worth fighting over, they open the bag, and it's just full of rotten food and they decide it's worth it. That scene was funny.

If you're thinking this is a family friendly film like Fantastic Mr. Fox probably is (I dunno, I haven't seen it), I wouldn't take young kids to see it, it has characters talking about poisoning dogs, it has dogs fighting and talks about dogs cannibalizing another dog because they were hungry, a few dogs talk about a dog who committed suicide with its own leash, it has dogs being experimented on. Yeah, not for young'uns. Also, it's rated PG-13 so that's a bit of a warning.

Let's talk about the characters. The cast is huge so I can't get into everyone, but I'll see what I can do. Koyu Rankin is great as Atari, even if you can't speak Japanese (I can't), you can still feel that this kid wants his dog back and will stop at nothing to do so. He even has a funny moment where he stops on his journey to go on a slide that he's not tall enough to go on.

At the end, Atari becomes Mayor because of him bringing the dogs back to Megasaki City and makes dogs legal and dogs are now treated as people rather than, well, dogs.

Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Bob Balaban, Bill Murray, and Jeff Goldblum are really great and entertaining as the dogs, but I want to talk about Bryan Cranston as Cheif in particular.  He's a stray who is essentially the alpha dog, but they're all the leader of this gang of dogs and he is outvoted a lot by the others and disagrees with pretty much everything they say. You think that he is a black dog, but after Atari bathes him, it turns out that he is a white dog with black spots and turns out that he is the brother of Spots from the same litter. At first, he doesn't care about Atari, but he later warms up to him.

I want to talk a little bit about Tracy (Greta Gerwig), she's a foreign exchange student from America who has a crush on Atari and finds out that this scientist did not kill himself, but was poisoned instead. And she helps with making dogs legal again. Greta Gerwig plays her well.

Konichi Nomura plays Mayor Kobayashi and he is responsible for banishing all dogs to Trash Island. I'm not sure how well he's played because his dialogue is in Japanese. He was also in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Most of the Japanese in the movie isn't translated with subtitles, but rather characters translating for them.

Overall, Isle of Dogs is Wes Anderson's best movie in my opinion, and is also my favorite film of 2018 so far. This would be my favorite Wes Anderson movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel is my second, and Rushmore is my third.

Isle of Dogs gets a 10/10. Not counting Civil War and The Avengers, this is my first 10/10 of 2018. I hope to see more that get that score.

Previous review - The Avengers
Next review - Iron Man 3