On Wednesday night at New York City’s Metrograph theater, while Wes Anderson acolytes geeked out over the presence of the auteur himself, Anderson was geeking out over Akira Kurosawa—the legendary Japanese director, best known for films like Seven Samurai and Drunken Angel. Anderson, who co-programed the Lower East Side revival house’s new six-film Kurosawa retrospective, was in attendance to pay homage to the 1949 post-war crime drama Stray Dog, which he echoes in his return to stop-motion animation, Isle of Dogs, which screened to joyfully raucous laughter later that night.
Like Kurosawa before him, Anderson knows a thing or two about the value of trusted collaborators. The Houston-born director has assembled a motley crew of talent, including Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, and Jeff Goldblum, that will follow Anderson’s idiosyncratic storytelling wherever it leads.
That tight-knit quality is especially rare in the world of animated filmmaking, where actors typically record their roles separately. “One joke that’s made all the time by the actors is, ‘I can’t wait to meet my co-stars.’ And what I felt [Tuesday] night [at the premiere] was the total opposite of that,” said longtime Anderson collaborator Jason Schwartzman Wednesday afternoon. “All the actors have worked together and known each other, and even the ones who had worked together for the first time, they were [recorded] together. I think that’s to Wes’s credit: he makes it an experience . . . watching all these people who’ve worked together in different capacities and orientations, it’s actually quite moving, because you just don’t see it very often.”
For Isle of Dogs, Anderson called on old friends (Schwartzman and Roman Coppola) and new (Kunichi Nomura) to co-write the screenplay—a strategy, he pointed out, more common in Japanese filmmaking than in American. During the Q&A, Anderson recalled someone telling him that Kurosawa used a similar technique involving several collaborators working alongside him, who was known as the “control tower,” or primary writer. The collaborators would sketch out a scene; the “control tower” would read the newspaper or something until they were ready for his feedback (or, as Anderson put it with a knowing smirk, his “grumbles”).
Anderson’s resulting film—as gorgeously wrought as it is genuinely funny—is set in a futuristic, imagined Japanese metropolis where a severe flu has overtaken the country’s canine population, leading the tyrannical Mayor Kobayashi (Nomura) to decree that all dogs, be they purebreds or mutts, be exiled to Trash Island. When Spots (Liev Schreiber), the beloved protector of Kobayashi’s 12-year-old ward, Atari (Koyu Rankin), is taken to the island, the human boy embarks on an epic search across the strange landscape to find his pet, with the help of four formerly domesticated dogs—Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray), and Duke (Jeff Goldblum)—and one rough-around-the-edges stray, Chief (Bryan Cranston), who turns out to be a very good boy.
Isle of Dogs boasts meticulous craftsmanship and fine-tuned details—from the soft ruffle of each dog’s coat to one masterfully shot sushi preparation scene—made possible by the magic of Anderson’s 27-person animation team. Never one to shy away from a slow-burn process, Anderson emphasized to the Metrograph crowd that, while the work happens slowly, there’s never a boring day when building a vividly imagined world from the ground up. “In an animated film,” he said, “if you don’t make it, it’s not in the movie. You have to design your trees. You have to decide what your clouds look like.” While he conceded that the process is “quite old fashioned and out of time,” Anderson joked that the scope of this particular project also grew to a size beyond his original imaginings: “It got a little bigger than I could grasp . . . I’m sure people were telling me, but I refused to accept it.”
The way Schwartzman sees it, “the medium of stop-motion does an awful lot to bring a—and I don’t use this word often—soul to the characters, because they are touched by human hands. The idea that somebody moved it a little bit, took a picture; moved it a little bit, took a picture; and did that from week to week to week, just to do one scene . . . life was exchanged from a human to an animated character, and it was captured in the camera.”
Anderson also cited the undeniable influence of another Japanese visionary-slash-animator: Hayao Miyazaki. When he visited the Ghibli Museum several years back, Anderson picked up copies of all of Miyazaki’s films, many of which he had yet to experience.
For Isle, Anderson drew on Miyazaki’s embrace of silent moments and delightful non-sequiturs to paint an even fuller, weirder picture of his hand-crafted world. In My Neighbor Totoro, for instance, “there’s a giant monster and a number of [soot] sprites, but two-thirds of the movie is spent cleaning the house, wandering the property, getting to know the neighbors, taking a bath—and there’s a lot of nature. There’s a different kind of rhythm and emphasis than you’d find in American movies.”
As for any political overtones audiences might read into a story about (cough) a powerful leader suspiciously exiling a major portion of society to a place called “Trash Island,” Anderson admitted that, during the writing process, he and his collaborators noticed striking similarities between their story and the news. “[We’d say], ‘I think this is happening now.’ But you don’t really know when you’re writing a story where it comes from,” he told V.F. “It’s filtered through your unconscious. Everything kind of goes into it a bit.” Added Schwartzman, “A country can have an unconscious. Things can be filtered through that, too. So it’s my unconscious picking up the country’s unconscious.”
Still, Anderson insists that in his creative process, the specifics of story come before any grand ideas or politically charged takeaways. As he told V.F. by phone prior to the Metrograph event, “We started with a group of dogs on a garbage-dump island. We said: ‘Why are they here? What’s happened around them?’ And the story grew out of the image of these dogs, which led us to saying, ‘These characters have been ostracized. There’s a society that’s turned against them.’ We took our inspirations from things that we’ve read and from history, but the beginning for us is really a handful of characters and their situation.”
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