Lost on Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs

The director's new movie is gorgeous to look at. Otherwise, it's a mess.

Isle of Dogs.
(Image credit: Courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Isle of Dogs, Wes Anderson's latest film, begins promisingly enough: A gorgeous mural of dogs living untamed in a canine utopia is interrupted by the appearance of a real dog in the foreground. He delivers a sober history of the longstanding enmity between dogs and the human Kobayashi clan, and relates how dogs got domesticated and reduced to pets. This stylized introduction fast-forwards into a Cold War-inflected future in which a forbidding mayor of the fictional Japanese city of Megasaki responds to an epidemic affecting canines by banishing them to "Trash Island." He is — you guessed it — a Kobayashi. And partial to cats.

The mayor's 12-year-old ward Atari — recently orphaned — decides to try to rescue his guard dog Spots. After his plane crashes, he's rescued by a gang of five dogs who help him evade his imperial uncle's rescue team.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.