There’s no such thing as purity when it comes to genre. The dogs’ language is rendered as English.) But as a fellow Westerner who loves that country’s art and cinema, I’ll just say that many of the Japanese classics he quotes from themselves borrowed nonstop from American movies, whether Western or noir. (In what seems to be a gesture toward acknowledging the incompleteness of translation, the spoken Japanese goes unsubtitled and only is occasionally translated by an official interpreter, voiced by Frances McDormand. Whether some of this cultural borrowing verges on irresponsible appropriation is a question for someone more Japanese than I to answer.

When women enter the picture, the script is less assured. That actor’s legendary scowl was the inspiration for the face of the villainous mayor, rendered, like the other human characters, in a hard plasticine that looks less tactile and more chilly than the dogs’ alpaca-wool fluff. Isle of Dogs draws from the samurai-movie tradition-and quotes a music cue from Seven Samurai twice-but the Kurosawa subgenre it most resembles is the gritty noir-influenced thrillers he made with Toshiro Mifune. Woodblock-style prints of long-ago dog-and-cat samurai warfare. A gemlike minutelong montage about the preparation of poisoned sushi. A taiko-drum–based score by Alexandre Desplat (with major contributions from taiko drummer and composer Kaoru Watanabe) that’s at once martial and delicate. There are clouds of smoke made out of cotton. I could’ve done without Tracy entirely, but we’ll get to that later.)Īs dark as the dogs’ reality is-dark enough to earn the film a PG-13 rating-the establishment of their world unfolds like a crazy quilt of visual and aural pleasures. (That last subplot is the movie’s weakest, and also the most open to charges of cultural insensitivity.

Meanwhile, back in Megasaki, a scientist sympathetic to the dogs’ plight (Ken Watanabe) rushes to create a serum, while an American exchange student, Tracy (Greta Gerwig), as a reporter for her middle school newspaper, tries to find out the truth about Mayor Kobayashi’s corruption.

Isale of dogs