What's Up With the "Isle of Dogs" Trailer?
Wes Anderson is back in the world of stop animation with Isle of Dogs, his first animated film since his smash success adaption of Fantastic Mr. Fox. The first trailer for the film dropped on Thursday, and if you guessed that there would be adorable gruff dialogue, sparse but evocative music, and extremely twee aesthetics, you'd be right:
With a voice cast that includes rolls deep even for a Hollywood film (spanning Bill Murray to Yoko Ono to Scarlett Johansson to Courtney B. Vance to Ken Watanabe to Jeff Goldblum to Tilda Swinton... etc.), Isle of Dogs takes place in some apocalyptic future where dogs are relocated to a very literal Trash Island. A young Japanese boy pilot makes his way to the island to find his dog spot; shenanigans ensue.
It's all very Wes Anderson and quaint, which also means that there are some strange cultural assumptions at play. This time, it means the dry Anderson humor, all rendered in English dialogue, is played against the young Japanese boy pilot's Japanese dialogue. The pilot's Japanese makes sense because the titular Isle of Dogs is situated by Japan. What is making some folks scratch their heads is how he's somehow situated outside the main language of the film:
Before watching the ISLE OF DOGS trailer: please don't be racist
After: if all the dogs are from Japan WHY DON'T THEY UNDERSTAND JAPANESE???- Hayley Centimetres (@hayley_sass) September 21, 2017
Isle of Dogs. That trailer was...well...weird. So the humans are voiced by Japanese actors and the dogs (the leads) are Westerners. What?
- ferdosa (@atomicwick) September 21, 2017
