Thursday, April 26, 2018

Wes Wanderson cinema is a world filled with symmetric shots, colorful characters, well design places and plot that seems to be repetitive from the last film.

His latest movie seems to go beyond his typical plot, but address social problems in the near future. Isle of Dogs is the animated story of a dystopian future where dogs overpopulation and flu virus threat the life all citizens in Japan.
The canine population is sent to Trash Island, by an authoritarian government led by the mayor Kobayashi (Konichi Nomura) of Megassaki City who signs a decree to expel all the dogs, while scientist Professor Watanabe (Akira Ito) is looking for the cure at the same time.

Atari Kobayashi (Koyu Rankin) nephew of Mayor Kobayashi goes on a mission to find his dog Spot (Liev Schreiber) which is the first dog to be sent out to Trash Island. Atari steals a military plane and crashes into the island, he is rescued by five dogs: Rex (Edward Norton) King (Bob Balaban) Duke (Jeff Goldblum) Boss (Bill Murray) and Chief (Bryan Cranston). Later the dogs decided to help Atari to find Spots.

Isle of Dogs explores the future where authoritarian governments use media to alienate the people by making them believe what the need to believe, while political plots keeps happening in the background. For instance, in one point of the movie, Professor Watanabe finds the cure for the dog's flu but the people behind mayor Kobayashi try to eliminate this cure by poison him, so the threat of the dog flu continues to scare the habitats of Megassaki City. Trash Island becomes an exile place for displaced minorities, in this case, dogs, an animal who is been used as a metaphor for the people who left their home country because of wars of poverty and is mistreated by more developed countries.

This film has an interesting connection with Wes Anderson previous film The Grand Budapest Hotel which touch the subject of old Europe and the troubling politic arena. The most interesting thing about Isle of Dogs is the groundbreaking work in stop-motion animation and the Wes Anderson talent to make this story make sense. Is not his best film, but is very innovative.



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