Isle of Dogs review: if you're looking for cute, cuddly Wes Anderson you're barking up the wrong tree

Amid this fracas, which Anderson times to comic perfection, Cranston’s Chief tears another dog’s ear off with his teeth, spits it out, and gently kicks it away, where it’s promptly gnawed upon by starving rats. Later, all the precision and detail of Anderson’s top-flight modelling team are set to work on showing us an anatomically perfect (human) kidney transplant. This is not a Wes Anderson film for the Best Exotic crowd, be very sure of that.

Watching Anderson go this dark might take some viewers aback, but there’s remarkable beauty and a sober delight to his vision of creatures scrabbling for survival. He has emphasised his debt to the Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa with this whole idea, and while the quest in the story, to find a missing guard dog called Spots, recalls some of that director’s samurai films, the setting is very specifically indebted to Dodes’ka-den, his multi-strand 1970 drama about people subsisting atop a rubbish heap. It’s Dog-des’ka-den! You heard it here first.

The allusions to all that stuff are worn lightly enough to be ingenious background. But the film’s graphic detailing, even by Anderson’s standards, is an ever-replenishing smorgasbord, an embarrassment of riches from beginning to end. Japan, 20 years hence, is coded crimson-red as a diabolical tyranny, with Orwellian posters scowling down everywhere depicting Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura, a co-screenwriter also), the dog-phobic, cat-stroking despot perhaps responsible for spreading the disease in the first place. His son Atari (Koyu Rankin), a rogue pilot, is the one looking for Spots, the redoubtable pet snatched from him and known as “dog zero” for being the first one dumped on Trash Island.

During this flashback-heavy exposition, Anderson throws us one still image of imperilled dogs cast out to sea, instantly recognisable as a superb pastiche of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Hanagawa, and by no means the last time the great Edo printmaker inspires an image or a mood here. 

The leaning on archetypes, some of them questionable, and stylisation across a whole range of Japanese artforms, are manoeuvres certain to get Anderson in hot water once the film is more widely seen, just as The Darjeeling Limited – a much more vacuously touristy exercise – was accused of mishandling race. 

But listen! Alexandre Desplat’s score, which might be peak Desplat for overall invention, is busy at work being a brilliant synergy of Western and Eastern musical forms. With its battery of taiko drums rattling away ominously, but also a fluty, buoyant finale, it suggests a missing link between Toru Takemitsu (Dodes’ka-den’s legendary composer) and the entirely non-Japanese Henry Mancini. Plus the score adapts – sorry, culturally appropriates – Prokofiev’s Troika from Lieutenant Kije and makes this fit just as well.

Individually, the voice cast have less do to here than they did in Fantastic Mr Fox – there are more characters to divide the lines between – but most get moments to relish. Harvey Keitel nearly steals the honours with a heartsore, one-scene cameo as the head of a rumoured cannibal clan.

Scarlett Johansson’s role as a show dog/love interest called Nutmeg, who bears a strange resemblance in grooming and deportment to Lee Remick, is off to the side – more so than Greta Gerwig’s feisty, thatch-haired student protester, busy speaking truth to power on mainland Japan while being, a little inexplicably, white.

A buried treat awaits in the end scroll, with Anjelica Huston credited as “mute poodle”. And this makes you realise something: for all the eccentric repartee Anderson and his screenwriters have whipped up, the film is generally at its best when the dogs aren’t talking. Few moments beat the apprehensive eye movements of Spots near the start, when he’s transported by cage across land and sea to become the island’s first dismal resident. 

And nothing’s funnier than the fights, furious flurries of dust and doggy limbs, like old Hanna-Barbera set pieces spun out of control. When Atari and Chief are separated from their posse and must push on into the sunset, there are just a few beats of quiet downtime, but they’re as visually magical as anything Anderson has ever dreamed up.

The film flirts with grotesquerie and even shocks with its late-breaking gambits. For once, in tone and in habitat, he has well and truly exited his comfort zone.

Isle of Dogs is released on March 30, 2018