Nosh 106: 'Isle of Dogs' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Review of Isle of Dogs

Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs is a furry splurge of creativity. Filmed over four years, using a wizard’s brew of stop-motion animation with a bravura graphic density, it proves again that Anderson is one of the most imaginative artists we have. You can call his work derivative, a baroque pastiche of inspirations, but as Picasso demonstrated it’s the polyphonic mutation of combinations that can fashion a tremendous body of work. Isle of Dogs is a masterpiece fit to join Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom and Fantastic Mr. Fox.

It takes place mostly on a big trash-dump island used as a toxic  Gulag for condemned dogs thought to carry plague, by order of power-mad Mayor Kobayashi of Megasaki. Even his family dog Spots is sent to garbage hell, pursued by his loyal boy-pal Atari. Cast-off canines include Chief, a slightly feral stray (“I bite. I don’t fetch”) and the fem-wow bitch Nutmeg (Scarlett Johansson vamps her, vocally). The film’s kennel of voices include Liev Schreiber, Ed Norton, Bryan Cranston, Bob Balaban,Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum, Yoko Ono, Anjelica Huston, Frances McDormand, Greta Gerwig and Harvey Keitel. It is inspired that most Japanese dialog is not translated (still, we get the drift), for it helps to unify the terrific design and animation team’s use of Japanese art, animé and stylized vistas.

With its propulsive rhythm paced by Kodo drums, the movie clicks into view like amazingly fluent Lego blocks. Anderson said he was most ignited by old Christmas cartoons, and by the live-action classics of Akira Kurosawa. We hear theme music from the master’s Seven Samurai, detect echoes of the official corruption in his The Bad Sleep Well, recall the slum zones in his High and Low, Dodes’ka-den and The Lower Depths. Also fertile are spores from monster films, spaghetti Westerns, Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, Tarantino’s Kill Bill. It won’t matter to young viewers, not knowing that Prokofiev’s Lt. Kije suite echoes its previous use in the British film The Horse’s Mouth. Nor that Kobayashi’s giant metal K echoes citizen Kane’s gate, nor that canine class conflict has many human antecedents in Japanese films.

Anderson’s design mania, his layered aestheticism, is not to everyone’s taste. As often in animation, the animals seem very human, the people somewhat less so. The climax is a little crowded with twists. Such complaints are kibble. Funny enough to be amusing without pushing for topical satire, often beautiful enough to deflect the olfactory resistance of trash-squeamish humans, the movie strums political, environmental, scientific and species themes that never overpower the fun of its fantasy.     

SALAD (A List)

18 Outstanding Dog Movies (with director, year):

A Dog’s Life (Charles Chaplin, 1918), High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1940), Lassie Come Home (Fred Wilcox, 1943), Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica, 1952), Hondo (John Farrow, 1953), Lady and the Tramp (Disney 1955), Across the Bridge (Ken Annakin, 1957), Old Yeller (Robert Stevenson, 1957), The Incredible Journey (Fletcher Markle, 1963), A Boy and His Dog (L.Q. Jones, 1975), White Dog (Samuel Fuller, 1982), Down and Out in Beverly Hills (Paul Mazursky, 1986), We Think the World of You (Colin Gregg, 1988), K-9 (Rod Daniel, 1989), Turner & Hooch (Roger Spottiswoode, 1989), Homeward Bound (Duwayne Dunham, 1993), 101 Dalmatians (Disney, 1996), My Dog Skip (Jay Russell, 2000), Best in Show (Christopher Guest, 2000).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

No one, even for horror and sci-fi films, has ever done better make-up creation than movie newcomer Maurice Seiderman’s for Orson Welles and other actors in Citizen Kane. But local union politics and studio protocol kept him from getting screen credit. As Seiderman recalled, “after it was exhibited, Franklin Roosevelt invited Orson to dinner at the White House. Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor, was one of the guests. Orson told her the story about this Russian immigrant who did the make-up on Kane, but could not get into the union. The following day, the Labor Dept. called the head of the union and said that it was beginning an investigation into unfair labor practices involving Maurice Seiderman. At four o’clock, a union card was delivered to me at the studio.” (From Harlan Lebo’s Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In The Horse’s Mouth, painter Gulley Jimson’s “antic mischief suggests Ealing, the famed North London studio where Alec Guinness flourished in comedy. But the film transcends that, and its roots run back through Joyce Cary’s novel to the London bohemia of Augustus John, Walter Sickert and others. While (director) Ronald Neame was no Hitchcock or Michael Powell, he knew how to tap the yeasty fermentation of Cary’s prose, which Guinness adapted and distilled, filling the movie’s cask.” From the Alec Guinness/Horse’s Mouth chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

The consummate profiles of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer transcend their doomed love in Out of the Past (RKO, 1947; director Jacques Tourneur, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca).

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