Isle of Dogs (2018, Wes Anderson) - SXSW Audience Award-winning stop motion animation with Bryan Cranston, Bill Murray, and Yoko Ono?!

[sasazuka]

Anyone else here looking forward to Isle of Dogs?

Spoiler: Isle of Dogs clip plus trailer

It's Wes Anderson's first feature film since 2014's Grand Budapest Hotel and his long-awaited return to stop-motion animation (with Mark Waring as animation director) after the critical (but sadly not commercial) success of 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Synopsis (via Wikipedia):

In a dystopian future Japan, dogs have been quarantined on a remote island due to a "canine flu". A boy, Atari, ventures to the island to find his dog, Spots. Other dogs—Chief, Rex, Boss, Duke, and King—help him search for Spots and evade the authorities.​

The five main dogs and their actors are Chief, voiced by Bryan Cranston, Rex, voiced by Edward Norton, Boss, voiced by Bill Murray, Duke, voiced by Jeff Goldblum, and King, voiced by Bob Balaban (who was the interpreter in one of my favourite films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and the boy's missing dog, Spots, is voiced by Liev Schreiber. I mentioned that Yoko Ono is also in this, her role is listed as Assistant Scientist Yoko Ono. There's a whole bunch of other famous actors in this too, but I don't feel like mentioning them all, they're mentioned in the trailer or just check the cast list at IMDb.

The boy, Atari, is voiced by a young Canadian actor named Koyu Rankin. Since this is a stop-motion animated movie, I was curious to see if the young Mr. Rankin was related to legendary animation producer Arthur Rankin Jr., of Rankin-Bass, the studio responsible for all your favourite classic stop-motion animated Christmas specials, but IMDb says his father is a Scottish-Canadian while Arthur Rankin Jr. was American (presumably of Scottish origin), so it's unlikely.

The music is by Alexandre Desplat, who also composed the Academy Award-winning score for Grand Budapest Hotel (and he recently won a second Oscar for The Shape of Water's soundtrack).

Isle of Dogs is set to be released this Friday, March 23rd. I hope it's a wider release and not a gradual rollout like some of Wes Anderson's other films because this will (hopefully) be a very rare opening weekend watch for me.

 

[Muttnik]

I'm actually really excited for this one since I loved Fantastic Mr. Fox. The music alone is getting me pretty pumped.

 

[Racist Trash]

Looks interesting thought it was going to be a kids movie until the close up of the ear being torn off.

 

[Tranhuviya]

Reminds me of The Plague Dogs

 

[SpessCaptain]

Very hyped to see this, I always love Stop Motion and Anderson always delivers something spectacular.

Reminds me of The Plague Dogs

Richard Adams is my favourite writer and Plague Dogs is one of his best works. I'm pretty salty they had to give it a happy ending rather an ambiguous one in the book cause people complained. ME3 before ME3.

 

[sasazuka]

Looks interesting thought it was going to be a kids movie until the close up of the ear being torn off.

It's probably aimed at roughly the same age range as Fantastic Mr. Fox where little kids might not be able to handle the occasional traumatic moment (i.e. the death of Rat in FMF) and perhaps the slight off-puttingness (is that a word?) of how the stop-motion puppets look but I doubt most older kids would be bothered by it and many older kids would likely appreciate some of the more morbid elements.

Come to think of it, I don't think my niece ever had much of a problem with Fantastic Mr. Fox and I don't think she was older than 4 when she saw it for the first time.

 

[SadClownMan]

I've always had a sweet spot for wes anderson films and this seems like the most wes anderson film yet. Probably the first movie in a long while I've been legit hyped for

 

[Kari Kamiya]

I thought this movie was coming out later this year, and it's going up against Pacific Rim 2 for opening weekend (and I wanna see that one too), so those results should be interesting. Anyway, I'm going to be seeing it with my grandparents probably Friday since they offered. I feel like Grandma's going to say it looks as ugly as Rango because she didn't like the art style of that film, but I don't care about the aesthetics, I just loved the cinematography in the trailer and that's why I wanted to see it. That and it's stop-motion.

Too bad this is so niche that it's not going to attract a big audience . I want to be proven wrong on this so bad.

 

[sasazuka]

Too bad this is so niche that it's not going to attract a big audience . I want to be proven wrong on this so bad.

I think the two factors that might work in making Isle of Dogs at least a little more of a box office success than Fantastic Mr. Fox is that Fantastic Mr. Fox has picked up somewhat of a cult following on video, cable and streaming and also that Wes Anderson is more recognized by "normies" now compared to 2009 due to the semi-breakout success of Grand Budapest Hotel.

Wes Anderson is now considered "mainstream" enough to be parodied by Family Guy in their recent episode spoofing the oeuvres of three different directors (the other two being Quentin Tarantino and Michael Bay).

 

[linchan]

I'm confused why a Japanese lady has a fro

 

[KimCoppolaAficionado]

I'm confused why a Japanese lady has a fro

It's Wes Anderson, you don't ask those sorts of questions. You just let the pastel colors and dry, acerbic dialogue wash over you.

 

[sasazuka]

I'm confused why a Japanese lady has a fro

Spoiler

Based on longer synopses in reviews I've read, I think the blonde afro girl is foreign exchange student Tracy Walker, played by Greta Gerwig.

 

[Lensherr]

This looks quite charming.

 

[Scratch This Nut]

I thought this movie was coming out later this year, and it's going up against Pacific Rim 2 for opening weekend (and I wanna see that one too), so those results should be interesting. Anyway, I'm going to be seeing it with my grandparents probably Friday since they offered. I feel like Grandma's going to say it looks as ugly as Rango because she didn't like the art style of that film, but I don't care about the aesthetics, I just loved the cinematography in the trailer and that's why I wanted to see it. That and it's stop-motion.

Too bad this is so niche that it's not going to attract a big audience . I want to be proven wrong on this so bad.

I loved Rango's art style A LOT. One of the few CGI films that ever impressed me stylewise.

I've been looking forward to this movie for months. Hope it plays near me soon.

 

[sasazuka]

Isle of Dogs is set to be released this Friday, March 23rd. I hope it's a wider release and not a gradual rollout like some of Wes Anderson's other films because this will (hopefully) be a very rare opening weekend watch for me.

Ah, seems like Isle of Dogs is getting a gradual rollout. I checked Friday showtimes for both major theatre chains in Ottawa (Cineplex and Landmark) and I don't see it listed.

I think the point of these kinds of staggered releases for "prestige" films is that they're hoping that positive word-of-mouth from cultural meccas like New York and Los Angeles and sometimes Toronto (plus Austin where it already screened at SXSW like I said in the description line) increases awareness and anticipation in smaller cities but the wait is still annoying for those of us in less-relevant cultural backwaters who already wanted to see the film without needing word-of-mouth to tell us that we should want to see it.

Hope it plays near me soon.

I hope you get it soon too.

 

[Trilby]

Ah, seems like Isle of Dogs is getting a gradual rollout. I checked Friday showtimes for both major theatre chains in Ottawa (Cineplex and Landmark) and I don't see it listed.

I think the point of these kinds of staggered releases for "prestige" films is that they're hoping that positive word-of-mouth from cultural meccas like New York and Los Angeles and sometimes Toronto (plus Austin where it already screened at SXSW like I said in the description line) increases awareness and anticipation in smaller cities but the wait is still annoying for those of us in less-relevant cultural backwaters who already wanted to see the film without needing word-of-mouth to tell us that we should want to see it.



I hope you get it soon too.

It's a shame to wait for a film like this to make it to my part of the country. It's like this is still the 1950's and films were simply distributed this way.

 

[sasazuka]

At least we're finally getting Mary and the Witch's Flower (the anime film directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a former Studio Ghibli director) on the big screen up here this weekend and I did kind of want to see that one, though not as much as Isle of Dogs.

 

[SteelPlatedHeart]

Twitter is already screaming white-washing and everything about the movie.

 

[mulliganfarmer]

I have nothing to add that hasn't already been said, so here's my favourite scene from FMF:

 

[Panty Shroom]

Twitter is already screaming white-washing and everything about the movie.

Saw that earlier too - they're whining about appropriation of Japanese culture 'n' shit. Twitter likes to appeal to its Tumblr demographic; there's always a piece in the newsfeed about something causing "controversy" because the snowflakes took offense to it.