A scene from Isle of Dogs (Fox Searchlight)

Isle of Dogs appears to be about many things: friendship, duty, hope, corruption, social and environmental decay, and talking dogs. It’s set in the near future of a fictionalized version of Japan, crossbred with Edo-era architecture and early industrialist technology. After an outbreak of flu ravages the city’s dog population, the government, led by a dictatorial mayor named Kobayashi (voiced by Koyu Rankin), signs a decree deporting all dogs to an island brimmed with abandoned factories, decaying buildings, and mountains of industrial waste and trash. One fateful day, a young boy named Atari crash-lands his miniature plane onto the island in search of his own deported dog, Spot. What follows is an extraordinarily adorable, visually stunning escapade, flavored by the Japanese cinema of the Kurosawa and Miyazaki persuasion.

Anderson’s signature pans, use of flat space, symmetrical framing, and deadpan dialogue feel surprisingly new when infused with the fantastical stop-motion animation world he’s created here. And like Anderson’s last epic The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs feels like a tale trying to delve into the macro of human society. Kobayashi and his ghastly looking political advisor embody the reeking stench of authoritarianism. The battered, desperate dogs left to die in the scrap heaps bear an eerie resemblance to certain populations in our own contemporary world. “What kind of people do we want to be?” pleads Atari to a crowd of scared and complacent human onlookers blinded by the spell of charismatic demagoguery. Indeed, Atari asks a vital question, one that our civilization has yet to truly answer.

The cast is, per Anderson, largely filled with A-list stars. Bryan Cranston, who voices the alpha dog Chief, is surprisingly fitting in the protagonist role, his deep and haunting voice complementing Chief’s cynical and fatalistic worldview. At the same time, with so many characters to melt one’s heart and such meticulous detail put into the animation, the underlying story, and its disparate themes, ultimately gets lost in its own cute and chaotic frenzy.

Ultimately, we are left with a narratively staid conclusion, one that doesn’t feel justified. It all ends up being a familiar tasting cake dressed up in stylishly colored frosting, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, cake is cake. But with so much detail and substance put into the mythology of the backdrop, Anderson may have missed a lot of opportunities in veering last minute into the more conventional.

There is also the blatant issue of Asiatic appropriation and Orientalism so common in Western cinema. Apart from Atari, none of the Japanese characters contain even a hint of conscious autonomy or agency. In fact, in a parallel story line focusing on a group of university students watching the main story unfold on the news, it is not the myriad of Japanese kids who decide that “enough is enough,” that they have to take moral action. No, it’s the lone Western foreign exchange student who is the sanest and the only conscious actor capable of inciting change.

Isle of Dogs is definitely the most interesting and unique of Wes Anderson’s impressive repertoire. However, his Orientalist perspective, which is also exemplified more in The Darjeeling Limited, deserves ample criticism. And though the story raises important existential and political questions about the self-destructive nature of contemporary society, it is capped off with a hackneyed conclusion that pretends to have already answered them.