ISLE OF DOGS

'''ISLE OF DOGS. Wes Anderson, director, producer (with others), script, from a story by Anderson''', Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, and Kunichi Nomura. English and Japanese. Adam Stockhausen and Paul Harrod, production design. USA/Germany: "A Fox Searchlight Pictures release, presented with Indian Paintbrush, of an American Empirical Pictures production, in association with Studio Babelsberg Film (production)" / Fox Searchlight Pictures (US distribution), 2018. See Variety review and IMDb for distribution and other complexities of credits.

Animation: SF/F and the sort of animal fable where the animals talk but are more themselves than stand-ins for humans.

Elsewhere we use the expression by Henri Bergson of "the superimposition of the mechanical upon the organic" and usually apply the idea — as Bergson does — explicitly to humans. ISLE OF DOGS images the imposition of threatening confinement in mechnical trash handling devices (including potentially compacting and incineration) of canines; cf. and contrast trash-compacter scene in A NEW HOPE (initially released as STAR WARS). Also significant: a kind of retro imaging of Japanese high-tech, including massive computerized testing devices appropriate to a near-future as seen in recent-past Japanese animation, but where scientific devices — including very large biological-analysis computers, each of which produces results on an IBM card — are positive: this is of political significance in the USA of 2018 in ways opposite of such devices in earlier periods (e.g. in COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT), especially what has been called The Long 1960s. Note also robot dogs opposed to protagonist organic dogs and visually associated (subtly) with Samurai and explicitly with reptiles with neck frills for threat displays.

MILD CAUTION: Variety review linked above comments: "A scattily joined subplot centered on American exchange student Tracy (Greta Gerwig), who persuades her more compliant Japanese peers to rise up in protest against Kobayashi’s dictatorship, skates a little too close to white-savior territory in a film that some will already have placed on thin ice for its ornate cherry-blossom-picking of Japanese culture and iconography. As with Pixar’s recent 'Coco,' however, there’s subjective leeway in the argument over appreciation versus appropriation." A cultural appropriation accusation is probably unjust; among canines as well has humans, though, there is an issue with a White- and white-with-spots-savior.

The mise-en-scène on the Isle of Dogs is Industrial Trash after many 20th-c. large-scale technological projects have been hit by natural disasters. Many shots show definitely organic dogs walking amidst the junk of a moderately high-tech civilization.

Tangential note: Not listed among cast and crew on IMDb but in the theatrical release credits and findable on line: "Puppet Wrangler" credit.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 13Ap18, 23Ap18