Isle of Dogs - a 2018 stop motion film by Wes Anderson

But animation for (kinda) adults cannot win any major award. Major awards are not quality based, but instead are based on judges who basically hold the majority opinions of 5 years ago. Mega normies, on other words.

edited 12th Mar '18 3:28:03 PM by KlarkKentThe3rd

And this is why animation needs to be taken more seriously.

sigh. it's great that people want animation to be taken seriously but i prefer the term "acknowledged as being a art form". what that implies is no fun and games and people making a full blown deal about it.

PG-13 animated films rarely get made and I find that exciting. I also believe only in animation can this concept be truly made.

By whom?

You already take it seriously, that should be enough. Mainstream critics will always be... let's just say, less intelligent than an average TVT user.

News flash—the movie is getting a Chinese release! This is actually very important, since a big part of the reason Anderson's previous animated movie, Fantastic Mr. Fox, flopped was because it wasn't released in China. Assuming ''Isle of Dogs has a similar (or smaller) budget, this means it's much more likely to be profitable.

Doesn't China and Japan still have a beef with one another? I am curious about they are going to take an American film based in Japan.

China does consume rameme, beef-free however.

edited 20th Mar '18 8:12:41 PM by KlarkKentThe3rd

I was wondering about that too. Didn't stop Big Hero 6 from doing well there, though.

Alright, so my local theater doesn't have the film listed on its site yet, and yet it has other films being released this week listed.

I heard that it's initially being given a limited release in several cities, and only getting a wide release later. If this is true, do you know when it's getting its wide release?

Early April.

Isle of Dogs has been getting mixed reactions from Asian-American viewers regarding its "cultural tourism Japanese aesthetics".

Angie Han: In Anderson's case, the borrowing is done artfully and meticulously. Anderson being who he is, every aesthetic detail is carefully considered. Not a grain of rice is out of place, not a taiko drumbeat is out of sync, not a kimono sash ripples without his say-so. There are affectionate references to Japanese cinema greats (this is a great rundown of all the Akira Kurosawa nods crammed into its 101 minutes), and homages to other Japanese arts like haiku and kabuki.

But none of it really means anything in Isle of Dogs. All of these stylistic flourishes are just that - flourishes, and nothing more. If there's some reason Isle of Dogs had to be set in Japan, if there's something specifically Japanese about the story Anderson is trying to tell or the message it's trying to send, I don't know what it is.

Alex Jung: Wes Anderson: I'm going to make a film about how a cruel Japanese government sends dogs to an internment camp!!

Japanese Americans: Uh...

Justin Chang: Much of the Japanese dialogue, especially Atari's, has been pared down to simple statements that non-speakers can figure out based on context and facial expressions. [...] The dogs, for their part, all speak clear American English, which is ridiculous, charming and a little revealing. You can understand why a writer as distinctive as Anderson wouldn't want his droll way with the English language to get lost in translation.

But all these coy linguistic layers amount to their own form of marginalization, effectively reducing the hapless, unsuspecting people of Megasaki to foreigners in their own city. Their assumed passivity is further underscored by the singularly unfortunate character of Tracy Walker, an American foreign-exchange student who becomes the angry, heroic voice of Megasaki's pro-dog resistance. At one point, she even smacks down a scientist voiced by Yoko Ono. (Yoko Ono!)

edited 28th Mar '18 6:38:47 PM by Tuckerscreator

First things I notice in the trailer:

- stereotypical slanted eyes on the humans

- nuclear explosions

- every human character acts angry.

I kinda predicted that Asian-Americans wouldn't take it well. And if I wanted Asian window-dressing that has nothing to do with the plot or what the movie is about, i'd rewatch Big Hero 6!

My take on the Japanese setting having to do with this particular story was that it's inspired by Japan having an entire island for cats, and the country's limited geographic space.

edited 24th Mar '18 6:53:00 AM by kyun

I was worried something like that would happen. It's a shame, too—a PG-13-rated animated movie that isn't a raunchy comedy isn't something the American film industry produces very often, so hearing this about it makes me wonder whether I should support it. It's getting good reviews and doing very well in limited release, though.

edited 24th Mar '18 9:23:04 AM by ElSquibbonator

It's really not that bad, or unexpected. Anderson has a "doll-house" style; everything is from the set's and costumes to hair and makeup so meticulous as to draw attention to it's artificialness. It's a definite Love It or Hate It kind of thing. That the same style is applied to a foreign nation is to be expected, for better or worse, but I wouldn't take it as a sign of any kind of racism on Anderson's part.

edited 29th Mar '18 11:52:40 AM by Eldritcho

How about we all learn a simple skill? Whenever someone accuses someone of being racist, we expect real proof from the accuser, or else tell them to get lost.

Can we do that?

The problem here is that you're viewing this as people accusing Anderson of being personally racist, as opposed to the film he made and how certain aspects of it may be objectionable in some way. Whether Anderson is personally racist or not is more or less irrelevant.

You don't have to be a pyromaniac to be an arsonist. If you're neglectful using someone else's stove and cause burn damage to them and their house, your lack of bad intentions don't make the burns less painful.

Just because a person sees fire everywhere does not mean there is a fire. Perhaps some people are just hallucinating.

if they can smell smoke and it's stinging their eyes,perhaps there is a fire somewhere,no?

Okay just to be clear here I’m just poking holes in your analogy because that’s the type of guy I am, how many people do you think are there who suffer from vivid hallucinations of fire ?

Versus say, normal people who would only claim a house is on fire because they do indeed see a house on fire ?

I feel like the analogy here is more like "there is a fire, but the people who set it are vehemently denying that any fire exists, even while other people are trying to tell them it does, but also the people trying to tell them the fire is real have had to deal with larger fires for a much longer time, so even though the person who set it is arguing that it's much smaller, it doesn't change the fact that there is, in fact, a fire, regardless of whether or not the person who set the fire meant to or not."

I feel like the analogy here is also "I am to making analogies as I am to being able to distinguish between breeds of horses, which is really, really bad at it."

Basically, the point I'm trying to get across is even if Anderson didn't intend to be racist, doesn't it make more sense to listen to Asian-American critics who regularly have to deal with similar kinds of racism than pretend the problem doesn't exist and they're just making it up?

edited 30th Mar '18 9:10:15 AM by unexplainedEnemy

Just got back from this, after seeing it with a movie-watching group on Meetup. Loved it; another worthy entry in Anderson's oeuvre. It's hilarious, heartfelt, surprisingly terrifying at times, and beautifully animated. Very high recommendation.

I do get some of the cultural-appropriation criticisms, though. There's a couple scenes where the plot briefly stops to beat you over the head with excessive "Japaneseness", like the random taiko concert and sumo match. It comes from a place of love (ie. it's not on the level of "White guy puts on a war bonnet and whoops like a 'red savage'), but still felt shoehorned in. One detail I did find iffy though was the mayor establishing a literal concentration camp for dogs and planning to poison them all at once. Clearly a reference to the German camps, of course, but given the setting comparisons to the Japanese-American camps are likely inevitable. And I'm not sure talking dog movies particularly need Holocaust references besides.

There are thankfully no atomic bomb jokes, either; of the explosions in the trailer, the smaller one is the kid's plane crashing, and the larger is a doodad falling off one of the bad guys' ships and blowing up. The aforementioned scene with the foreign exchange student and Yoko Ono's character is actually a Get a Hold of Yourself, Man! scene; Ono's character had fallen into a drunken depression after her mentor was poisoned by the bad guys.

But no, I detected no conscious bigotry. If anything it's actually an anti-racism animal fable in a similar vein to Zootopia, which it actually shares quite a few plot points with, just with the addition of humans. How well it does it is probably up the the individual, but if it means anything all three people of East Asian descent who came to this Meetup liked it.

edited 31st Mar '18 9:21:47 PM by HamburgerTime

Started a tearjerker page. Go nuts!

The movie is going wide this coming Friday. It's already accumulated some $18 million, which is a lot for a limited-release movie, so I wonder how it's going to perform in wide release. On the one hand, it'll be up against the likes of Sgt. Stubby, Sherlock Gnomes, and even Rampage. On the other hand, it's gotten very good reviews and is apparently going to get a Chinese release (only the second Wes Anderson movie ever to be released there). The elephant in the room, of course, is its budget. I'm tempted to guess it cost about as much as Fantastic Mr. Fox, if not slightly less. I remember seeing somewhere that it cost $35 million, but it wasn't an official source so I don't know whether to trust it.