Isle of Dogs

Wes Anderson’s 2018 stop motion film sets an invented Japanese city under a canine flu order banishing every dog to a rubbish island; a boy, Atari, goes to find his own. A rule is declared in the opening minute and never broken: humans speak their own language unsubtitled, translation comes only via an interpreter, an exchange student or a device, and barks reach us in English. Without Japanese, the plot comes only from the dogs. Andy Gent, head of the puppet department, puts the build at 1,105 animatable puppets and some 20,000 replacement faces. Animation director Mark Waring says it was shot mostly on twos, twelve images a second, against the perfectly smooth stop motion look. The credits say United States and Germany; the stages stood in east London. It opened the 68th Berlin festival, where Anderson took the Silver Bear for Best Director; both Oscar nominations, Animated Feature Film and Music (Original Score), lost. In Another Gaze, Rebecca Liu called Japan a mirror for the Western imagination; in The New Yorker, Moeko Fujii answered that calling the absent subtitles dehumanising puts English speakers first. A good fit if you take not following half the dialogue as a declared rule, not a fault. Not for anyone wanting a smooth animated surface: shooting on twos deliberately keeps it rough.