Isle of Dogs has a crazy premise.
Twenty years into the future, Japan is overrun with canines, so the government ships the pups to the affectionally-named Trash Island, where a 12-year-old crashes his airplane to find his dog and expose the corrupt Mayor Kobayashi. But because this is a Wes Anderson movie, his first since 2014’s Oscar-winning The Grand Budapest Hotel, it has an even crazier cast.
There’s: Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand, Courtney B. Vance, Fisher Stevens, Mari Natsuki (voice of the Bathhouse Witch in Spirited Away), Yojiro Noda (lead singer of RADWIMPS, who provided the music for Your Name), Harvey Keitel, Liev Schreiber, Bob Balaban, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, F. Murray Abraham, and Yoko Ono. Walter White and Yoko Ono, together at last.
Anderson’s his inspiration for Isle of Dogs came from two sources: Rankin-Bass Christmas specials (“I always liked the creatures in the Harryhausen-type films, but really these American Christmas specials were probably the thing that really made me want to do it”) and Akira Kurosawa (“The new film is less influenced by stop-motion movies than it is by Akira Kurosawa”). A movie about an island of witty dogs, with a soundtrack by an obscure French ingenue from the 1960s (I assume), sounds great… but I also want to see Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Rashomon. That can be Anderson’s next project.
Isle of Dogs opens on March 23, 2018. Watch the trailer above.
