Isle of Dogs review – Wes Anderson unleashes a cracking canine caper | Peter Bradshaw's film of the week

Set in a dystopian Japan of the future, the animated story of a boy’s search for his lost pet is crammed with visual inventionIt’s set in Japan, though east London’s Isle of Dogs just happens to be a short drive from 3 Mills Studios, which did a lot of the work on this film. So maybe our Isle of Dogs influenced the director, Wes Anderson. Or maybe he chose the title because it sounds like: “I love dogs.”Isle of Dogs is another utterly distinctive, formally brilliant exercise in savant innocence from Anderson, somewhere between arch naivety and inspired sophistication. I laughed a lot, not really at jokes, but at its hyper-intelligent stabs of visual invention. It’s a stop-motion animation – like his Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) – visually controlled to its every analogue micro-particle, a complete handmade world. The screenplay is by Anderson, along with Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and the Japanese actor and writer Kunichi Nomura who was also casting director and voices the villain of the piece – the dog-hating Mayor Kobayashi. Continue reading…
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