Isle of Dogs: Stray Dogs and Show Dogs

At the heart of his work, then, is the question of civility: how it’s constituted, what it maintains, and what happens when it breaks. If Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Anderson’s first foray into stop-motion, thinks through the fantasy of taming the wild outlaw—the paradox of the reformed fox who simultaneously wants to be more fantastic than others and gives in to his chicken-stealing impulses because “that’s what foxes do”—Isle of Dogs is interested in the thornier issue of pets, the domesticated “other.” As the dogs find out at the beginning of the film, no amount of obedience can ensure safety when they are viewed, fundamentally, as disposable: all dogs are carted out to Trash Island and face the terror of extermination.

The question of the film is not simply what it means to acknowledge someone else but what it means to do so within these systems that separate beings between pet and master, stray and show dog, wild and tamed. In these struggles, minor gestures can take on a world of meaning. On Trash Island, the pet dogs recall the kindness shown to them by their masters. They gossip and mourn the demise of the company that made their favorite snacks. But they realize, when Atari comes to the island, that he is the only one—of all their owners—who was willing to put himself at great personal risk to try and find his dog. This realization about their attachment to a system of gifts and manners based on exclusion echoes the oddly affecting moment in The Grand Budapest Hotel when Zero and Gustave are about to get beaten up and executed by fascist soldiers on the train. An officer pokes his head into their carriage, recognizes the concierge, tells his men to release them, and apologizes profusely to them both. “Your companion was very kind to me when I was a lonely little boy,” the officer explains to Zero. After the officer leaves, Gustave tries to turn this interaction into a lesson about civility but gets fed up with the absurdity of it: “You see, there are faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed, that’s what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant . . . Oh, fuck it.”

In hindsight, we can place Isle of Dogs in a lineage of twenty-first-century films that have turned to Japan to consider questions of acknowledgment. From Sofia Coppola’s 2003 Lost in Translation to Bong Joon Ho, Michel Gondry, and Leos Carax’s 2008 anthology film Tokyo! and Abbas Kiarostami’s 2012 Like Someone in Love, non-Japanese auteurs constructed a Tokyo where people are no longer really speaking to each other. For Anderson, Japan is of interest not because of its urban alienation but because it is a fitting backdrop for working out an ambivalence toward technology: on the one hand, the artificial dog-robots are the only irredeemable “bad guys” in the film; on the other, similarly advanced electronics are what allow different species to talk to each other, as when simultaneous-translation earpieces enable Spots to comfort Atari after his parents’ deaths.

Yet what Anderson’s film surfaces is neither a fetishization of the lack of communication—with its Orientalist trope of Asiatic “inscrutability”—nor a celebration of speaking beyond cultural or linguistic divides. In Isle of Dogs, the dogs and humans understand each other well enough without the simultaneous-translation pieces; the question is whether or not they want to answer each other’s call. Halfway through the film, Atari and Chief are walking in an abandoned amusement park, and Atari, despite not being tall enough to go on the pagoda slide—and against Chief’s clear objections—nonetheless decides to try it out. Once he lands, he looks around and sees that Chief has left him. We see Chief walking away, mumbling to himself about how he will not answer to a master. Atari calls again and again—“Black dog, where are you?”—sits down, whistles, and, teeth chattering, starts to cry. When Atari whistles again, we hear a whistle back—and Chief emerges at the edge of the frame. They whistle together, and the dog scampers off. It’s a graceful little scene—one character yields because they know it will make the other feel better—and a world opens up in a single gesture.

This gesture has other consequences. What promptly follows is a bath in a frothy tub of Hokusai Beer, where we find out that, underneath the dirt, Chief looks exactly like Spots, with a black snout instead of a pink one. The stray is transformed into someone who can be recognized as family, and then into a bodyguard, in quick succession. Whatever traits that marked him out and made him like a western hero—what film critic Robert Warshow calls “a figure of repose” with his loneliness “belonging to him intimately and testifying to his completeness”—are sacrificed so Chief can join the security detail for the new mayor of Megasaki, Atari. In the end, Atari, the dogs, and Atari’s pro-dog student-protester friends have been able to overthrow the old regime, and Atari is able to convince his uncle that imprisoning and exterminating dogs is unequal and “without honor.” But in Atari’s new regime, populated by his student friends, it is not clear whether any of the structures that had made the dogs so disposable have been eradicated. In fact, we strongly suspect that they haven’t: Anderson shows us a glimpse of a lone dog-robot banished to Trash Island, who is allowed a final sneeze.